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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: Viva La Vida

  • Solange Sings Coldplay: Next, Beyonce Tackles The Shins

    solangeNot 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 twists and turns in order to deviate from the original. This could be any chick with a moderately good voice in a karaoke bar. In this case, I wonder what’s worse, it sucking or it just being kind of “eh”.

    What do you think?

  • The Coldplay/Satriani Conundrum

    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 was sued for lifting a minute and a half of a classical recording on his hit “Will You Be There” and not giving credit. Sister Janet and Des’ree had a little issue with Janet’s “Got ’til it’s Gone” having a similar melody to Des’ree’s “Feel So High”. And our very own NKOTB were accused of stealing “I’ll Be Your Everything” from Percy Sledge-Sledge lost, by the way. If I was Percy, I’d have spent more time suing Michael Bolton for fucking up my signature song).

    Anyway, the two songs have obvious similarities, but it begs the question: with only so many available notes and chord progressions and melodies in the world, wouldn’t it stand to reason that there would be songs that sound similar to one another? It’s entirely feasible that Coldplay had no idea the Satriani song existed, and if they did, they’re idiots because they should’ve known that Satriani would find out and sue. However, I’m surprised there aren’t more songs out there that just by coincidence wind up sounding like other songs.

    Here are the two songs: what do you think?

  • The New Music Revue: “Viva La Vida”…Coldplay…Ole!!!

    ColdplayHuh, 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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