I’ll preface what I’m about to say here with the following confession: Coldplay makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out with a spork. Okay, so at the time of its release I vaguely fancied "Yellow" (I was young and impressionable and doing A LOT of drugs), and I will admit to at one time being mildly taken with the video for "The Scientist" (in the same way that under the right emotional circumstances one might find oneself mildly taken with, say, the images in an Anne Geddes calendar). But beyond those two qualified concessions I have no love for Coldplay, and generally fall in line with those who view the band as being, at best, "Radiohead Lite." And to my mind, even that sort of diminishing juxtaposition may be doing Radiohead a disservice.
The comparison isn’t a new or original one, of course — Coldplay has long been dogged by accusations of lifting liberally from Radiohead’s catalog, and the band’s influence on Coldplay’s music is something singer Chris Martin has publicly acknowledged in fanboyish tones on more than one occasion, despite Thom Yorke’s withering dismissal of Coldplay as "lifestyle music." In 2005, Martin effused, "We’re like an eager dog just yapping around their heels, and
they’re trying to kick us away. It’s like unrequited love.
I’m in love with a lot of things. Some of those things love me back.
And some of them don’t — and one of them is Radiohead." And as recently as June of last year Martin was quoted in a Rolling Stone interview as saying, “Sometimes I feel like [Radiohead] cleared a path with a machete, and we came
afterward and put up a strip mall. I would still give my
left ball to write anything as good as OK Computer."
Umm, Chris? In order for someone with your caliber of talent to write something as good as OK Computer we’re going to need BOTH balls, kay?
And so though, yes, I know awards shows are more often than not popularity contests — the outcomes rarely aligned with anything like true artistic merit, the winners often undeserving and the deserving often losers — I must admit that I still got a bit of a smug charge out of watching Radiohead’s performance during Sunday’s Grammy Awards. Because while Radiohead was pitted against Coldplay in the "Album Of The Year" category (which neither would win — Radiohead ended up netting the Alt Ghetto Award, aka Alternative Music Album, while Coldplay inexplicably snagged Best Rock Album (I’m sorry, COLDPLAY is more "rock" than Radiohead?! In what alternate space-time dimension?) and Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals for their song "Viva La Vida"), the master effectively wiped the floor with the student and brought down the house with this kick-ass rendition of "15 Step," backed by University of Southern California’s Trojans marching band. Insult to injury: Radiohead’s performance was introduced by Chris Martin’s wife Gwyneth Paltrow, who gushed about them onstage to a degree that bordered on Verbal Blowjob territory (ouch!). Is CRANKING IT UP timez nao:
Radiohead – 15 Step (Grammys 2009)
Radiohead. Accept no lame-ass inferior Adult Contemporary-type substitutes, yo.
About Jen O.
