Not only was Chris Martin a guest at Beyonce & Jay-Z’s wedding, but he’s been covered by Beyonce’s little sis Solange. The Knowles who released the better album last year tackles Coldplay’s #1 smash, and the result isn’t the train wreck it looks like on paper. However, keep your pants on. What it really amounts to is Solange singing karaoke to the Coldplay song. The band just recreates the original arrangement. The best covers have […]
So I’m sure that you’ve all heard that guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani is suing Coldplay, contesting that their #1 hit “Viva La Vida” sounds like his “If I Could Fly”. Plagiarism suits have been commonplace in the music industry since at least the early Seventies. Remember the “My Sweet Lord”/”He’s So Fine” dustup? (actually, I wasn’t born yet, so I don’t). In the Nineties, the plagiarism suit hit a couple of my favorites. Michael Jackson […]
Huh, I don’t really know how to start this one. So everybody here knows who Coldplay is, right? Fairly big alt-pop band with arena-sized choruses, love, Fair Trade, falsettos…got Brian Eno to come in and produce their latest? Cool. So I can get right into it and say that Viva La Vida is the most accomplished album of their career. I mean that in pretty much every way: every song has its own color, the runtime is perfect, and the band has never sounded tighter or more inspired. It’s also the closest they’ve come to making a complete statement, rather than just stringing a bunch of romantic, isolated and vaguely political songs together and calling it an album. What is that statement you ask? Well, look at the title. Martin christened the first song of the band’s debut with the chorus “We live in a beautiful world.” Viva La Vida is his way of opening up that world and exposing its beauty. Yeah there’s death, yeah there’s heartache, yeah there’re…despots and lynch mobs…but all of this pales in comparison to the vibrancy of life itself. Is that a bunch of flowery bullshit? Well, that’s for you to decide. I’m willing to suspend disbelief for forty-five minutes.
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