The class system in music and how I learnt to love Coldplay

And I have to say that I get the impression that all their music is just kind of vague idealistic moaning about "stuff", nothing more , which is quite a studenty thing anyway (which I'm sure I'm guilty of myself). So I sympathise with the "middle class tossa" argument to a point. Once you bear in mind it's based on a stereotype, albeit one Coldplay are kind of living up to.

The people who have promoted the idea that Coldplay are 'middle class tossas' making music for other middle class tossas and students (ditto) are essentially music mag journalists. They too have been through university, but (esp NME)appear to have white-boy middle class hang-ups about who they are and where they come from. Consequently, they project this hatred onto Coldplay, often even in the same article as actually admitting that the music they make can be sublime and great pop (cf the 2000/1 Xmas NME Coldplay interview).

Coldplay don't make life-changing, system-smashing or epoch-defining music: fortunately some bands do. Not everyone can though, and at least what Coldplay do make touches a nerve in most people, and occasionally hits the spot (Yellow).

& in some ways one might argue that listening to tosh stems from refusal to acknowledge privelages of class -- construction of music as "special" and distinctive and refined accompanied by pissing on otha music/lower classes.

bon-vivant tourism is of course also another thing.

I'm not sure about your argument that Coldplay "say nothing".

I suppose they don't say a whole lot, but does an indie band that you like (i.e Piano Magic) really say anything either?

What constitutes saying something anyway?

I'm not sure about your argument that Coldplay "say nothing".

Tom exposed as rockist scum shockah.

Back to Friday night, I got off of work and decided to finish the last Bruce Sterling novel(There were only 400 pages left). I had the house to myself, so I decided to play a lot of darker IDM and noise (Arovane, Autechre, Panasonic, Monolake/Robert Henke solo stuff, Tomas Jirku...).I read about 300 pages in the next five or six hours. By the time the sun started to rise I decided that I needed to take it easy and listen to a bit of pop music after all this dirge.

I run upstairs and have a look through my very neglected "band music" section of my collection, and pull out the Coldplay disc. I listened to the entire thing, and I was suprised how much my perception of them has changed in the last few months. In the US, we have a different perception of them, the media does not shove them down our throats here. I never even knew what they looked like until Trouble started getting a fair amount of play on MTV2 a few months back.

I completely understand why people (especially people in England) hate this band. they are so dishwater dull, there is no spark on that record. The performances are good enough, the songs are good enough, but none of it is really special. The only thing I will give that record is that who ever mixed and mastered it did a great job. There is no passion or personality in their music, it is just good 'enough' to sell records.

Listen to an old Stevie Wonder or Temptations records, the first Roxy music album, even Galaxie 500. Any of those guys had a spark, they has some essential, sub-verbal, something that gave their music lift and vigor. Coldplay has absoulutely no vigor, no passion. They are not horrible, but they are not brilliant either. Why should they be, what have they got to worry about, they will all have decent careers to fall back on when they are done play pop-star. It is just weird that they were the ones to get famous, and not any number of other bands.

I do not hate them, I do not love them either. They are just the perfect example of dishwater boredom. They are just there, along with everything else in the mediasphere that is pleasantly ignorable.

If I could find more records like VU, I think I would be listening to a lot more rock music.

Piano Magic say more to me - "I Am The Sub-Librarian" is a lovely pen- portrait in words and music, "Crown Estate" and "Dark Secrets Look For Light" are unpleasant and poetic and striking, "Amongst The Books An Angel" makes a rather base appeal to a lovelorn intellectual streak. Sometimes they say nothing to me - Artists Rifles, for instance - but generally I enjoy them for the intimacy and intricacy of the music more anyway.

Blimey, the Daily Mail said the same thing after Blur beat Oasis to number one, which shows how low News International have sunk.

Living in Australia, we also don't have Coldplay shoved down our throats... I don't see how anyone can say coldplay are not saying anything! They are so clearly a reflection of where the western culture,and male and female relationships are at. I find them to be very clear, emotive descriptions of metaphysical rhythms...and listening to them, I find a window opening, of many rich contexts and references. It's very honest, clear and lyrically precise, entering into more subtle areas most music does not have the courage or ability to carry off. My two favourite bands at the moment: Coldcut and Coldplay!

Julian.

Stop. Right there. And just ask yourself this question -- "Is it at all possible that I'm mistaking my own feelings for the music for that of everyone else's feelings about the music?"

Still, Coldcut and Coldplay, I like the conceptualism there. Everything on the Cold Meat Industries label is for you, then. ;-)

Live in a hovel. Have no money. Single parent family etc. etc.

Spend days Abstractly Loathing Self. With adjectives. Don't write poetry because am convinced of laughability of attempting such.

Do not feel Pain of Life caused by Income Bracket.

Listen to music of Oversensitive Middle Class Boy circa Mid Seventies.

Bit suspect for a girl with my overdraft.

Am I a class traitor? I need to know...

Anyone with a hit has obviously hit some kind of nerve in the collective psyche, no?

not least since the middle classes do such a great job of hating themselves already

OK, I complain if Coldplay come in my immediate hearing, but it's nothing to do with their class or their education status. It's because I find their music cold and dull and empty. But maybe if I were sitting on a train travelling through cold and dull and empty land, I could see how that would appeal. Music is so much about emotional state.

as for the whole middle-class thing, i guess you could fairly say there are few bands who seem more middle-class than Coldplay, like they're the 21st century equivalent of guys with drippy beards and hippy hair in 70s prog bands... they just ooze a middle-class dullness, like they probably know a thing or two about good wine, have a cottage in the west country for the summer or somethinge. they just ooze safeness.

why do the british hate the middle class? i'd say that a lot of the entertainment inductry and media, which is for the most part utterly completely and totally middle-class to a fault, displays a vile contempt for the working classes. and if you aren't working class, didn't go to private school, aren't used to moving in those circles, you will be subject to a casual but no less cutting dismissiveness from those people for not conforming to their standards or sharing their upbringing.

the evening the editors of NME poached me from Melody Maker, i wore my univeristy hoody to the bar (i didn't have any other warm clothes at the time, it was early february)... they seemed genuinely surprised that i hadn't attended Oxbridge, unlike the majority of NME's editorial staff.

i'm not gonna argue with you there, but wasn't roseanne considered revolutionary when it began, because it portrayed working class americans on TV in a format (sitcom) typically dedicated to the american working class?

God, enough with the working class chip on the shoulder already. Feudalism is over. Get over it!

hey, look what i almost stepped in!