The first time I saw Coldplay I honestly wasn’t sure if they were a joke. Allow me to explain. A few years ago, before they hit it big, they were featured as performers on NME’s Carling Awards show, which is known for such feats of critical genius as giving out awards nobody cares about and always giving Primal Scream awards, even if they haven’t released anything in three years.

Between the segments featuring the greasy, simian drunks of NME’s staff giving awards to the greasy, simian drunks of the British music world, they brought a new band called Coldplay on the stage to perform. The instant they started, I was convinced that it was some sort of joke set up by NME to make fun of indie music. The singer was a laughably lugubrious donkey-faced 15-year-old and the music was a watered-down pastiche of Ride or early Radiohead; even the name of the band could be easily mistaken for a jab at the gloomy fog-rock that had dominated British music in the past years. If it wasn’t some sort of a clever joke, I thought, then Rock and Roll music was doomed. To save my sanity, I chose to believe it was a parody.

Imagine my surprise and dismay when I heard the very same song on the radio here in the States a few months later. I learned that it was called Yellow, and the singer was not, in fact, 15 years old. He really was just a nerdy, earnest man with a piano who wanted to tell me of his pain through the medium of tedious, leaden, derivative ballads. I was rather confused as to why American audiences largely rejected the comparatively lively British music of the 90s but were so taken with such mediocre, joyless, and uninspired pap. Then I remembered that the last British guitar band to hit it really huge over here was Oasis. Not just any Oasis, but Oasis in whiny balladeer mode, a la Wonderwall. Could it be that the ridiculously fickle American pop audience was subconsciously looking for, of all things, a surrogate Oasis? I honestly wouldn’t put it past them, since they were stupid enough to fall for Oasis the first time.

Coldplay’s first album, Parachutes, didn’t quite catapult them into the realm of true stardom. It did, however, produce the aforementioned Yellow, a single which was bland and uncontroversial enough to appear comfortably beside Creed and 98 Degrees on Now! Volume 6. Parachutes also featured the modern rock radio downer Trouble, which was more of the same sad-bastardism and unnecessary falsetto, but this time with graceless, repetitive piano playing to add some variety.

Their first album may have been mildly troublesome, but the year 2002 is when Coldplay really began to get ridiculously irritating. They released an album entitled “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” which describes the all-too-frequent physical sensation of shame that lead singer Chris Martin gets when he wakes up in a pool of his own urine. The first single from the record was In My Place, a slightly peppier number in which Martin goes into full-blown poet mode to make such bold pronouncements as “Yeah” and “Oh Yeah.” It should also be noted that this song seemingly samples the first twenty seconds of Ride’s Dreams Burn Down and runs them through some sort of studio “weak-sauce pussy-filter.”

The second single, the one which makes most of us click off our radios like they were playing a tape of our parents having sex, was The Scientist. You might argue that so far I’ve been expressing my own highly subjective opinions on music and nothing I say can be regarded as concrete, but I think I can state this as fact: The Scientist is a terrible song. It is empirically terrible. I’d go get the special NASA Super-Objective Terrible-Meter we invented to prove it, but you’re probably not smart enough to understand the readouts anyway.

The instrumentation of the song is not just weak, it’s frustratingly awful. The piano slowly shits out chords without any style or feeling. It’s not like we expect Elton John to hop out in a Donald Duck costume and boogie down, but perhaps he could have injected some sort of melody in the piano line. An acoustic guitar jumps in after the first chorus to remind us that we’re listening to a ballad, and it too just bangs out the chords. After the second chorus an electric guitar is added to remind us that we’re listening to a “modern rock band” and not our mother’s Joan Baez records. Guess what this electric guitar does? Nothing, of course! Neither of them adds any sort of tune, or any counterpoint to the vocals. They're just there, as if by force of habit.

And the vocals themselves, which carry the song, are totally devoid of any emotion other than some sort of lethargic wistful melancholy. The lyrics are typical, clichщd, inarticulate sad-parting-song bullshit, and he sings them with such incredible, unmusical lameness that I can't help wonder why he didn't just write them down and hand them out to us instead. The man should not trust himself as an interpreter of his own songs. He is clearly without the slightest idea of how to sing a song, so he just plops out his lyrics with as much gusto as a suicidal salesman making his final vacuum cleaner pitch.

The worst part of this whole terrible fiasco is that it’s made Coldplay famous. Famous as in dating-Gwynneth-Paltrow-and-getting-namedropped-by-Kelly-Osbourne famous. Famous enough that I know the lead singer’s name, and I have to see his stubbly horse-face on television and in magazines. The terrible side-effect of this is that they apparently want to use this newfound fame to kill rock and roll entirely and permanently, as evidenced by this news story from futureforests.com:

You loved the album 'A Rush of Blood to the Head' - Now help make it Carbon Neutral!

Coldplay are not only one of the best bands in the world, they are also committed to saving the world! Coldplay has joined with Future Forests in the fight to prevent climate changes by planting 10,000 Mango trees in Karnataka, India.

The trees provide fruit for trade and local consumption and over their lifetime will soak up the carbon dioxide emitted by the production and distribution of Coldplay's best selling album 'A Rush of Blood to the Head' .

Well, that’s just fine and dandy if you’re Al Goddamned Gore, but come on, these pathetic bastards are supposed to be a rock band! Even those shitheads Oasis knew enough about their responsibilities to at least feel up a few stewardesses and throw some televisions out of hotel windows. But instead of doing this, Coldplay is performing CHARMING GESTURES OF ECOLOGICAL COMPASSION! In turn, this will make the desperate-to-be-hip 35-year-olds with goatees and flat-front Gap khakis even queerer for Coldplay, which will make Coldplay more famous, which will make them richer and more able to continue to put out utterly worthless albums and make us more likely to turn on the radio and hear the brain-numbing dance remix of “Clocks.” God help us all.

They released an album entitled “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” which describes the all-too-frequent physical sensation of shame that lead singer Chris Martin gets when he wakes up in a pool of his own urine.

Originally Posted by Marcoyeh

Everyone likes Coldplay

Originally Posted by War_Hero

So, now when a band is good and a lot of people like them, they automatically suck because people like them? Get over yourselves.