They play this video all the time at my gym, and despite the fact that I bring my own music, the annoying voice of Chris Martin manages somehow to reach my eardrums, and I cringe. I am talking about the video for 'Paradise', the second single off Coldplay’s last album, ‘Mylo Xyloto’.
Beside the fact that the video is ridiculous and only exists to remind us that the song has really nothing to say, the falsetto gushy chorus wants to hook the listener up like a sticky donut he or she absolutely wants to resist to.
It is so predictable and overplayed – how many times does Martin sing ‘para-para-paradise-oh oh oh oh’? – that I beg for the end of it each time… in fact half of the song is filled by these repetitive lines. The opening strings are sentimental, the build up has been done many times before, and this time is not even the best one. What did they want to accomplish with this feel-good crowd-pleasing anthem? It sounds like any of their other songs, boring, both super radio friendly and stadium-size ready, like a recipe they repeat each time with the same impersonal monotony, manufactured to trap you in that euphoric and hopeless non-sense. There is not a moment in this song that you would not expect, or that would make it a little more ‘difficult’ to listen to.
Coldplay has never been remarkable for the lyrics, but this is just flat platitude: ‘Life goes on, it gets so heavy’? We could forgive this to someone who shows some lyric brilliance somewhere else, but there’s no such thing here. And Chris Martin should give up on his use of metaphors because they are heavier than the elephants in the video: ‘The wheel breaks the butterfly every tear a waterfall’… The tear and the waterfall again? I guess he was so happy with that one, he recycled it here. A girl, then a butterfly,… metaphors don’t work when you are immediately aware they are used as metaphors, they become almost comical at this point.
The whole song is harmless and pointless, when it surges about some hope for a paradise, Martin could repeat any word, no one is listening but everyone just wants to sing along.
Honestly, I don’t understand Coldplay’s success, or rather I understand it completely, it’s not challenging at all, and most people don’t like challenge and often fall for watered down product. And Coldplay, fully aware of its worldwide popularity, wants to stay in this not-taking-any-risk position, the band will continue producing blockbusters after blockbusters, with forced effects to mimic a fake grandiosity cleared up of anything that could distract us from its surging effect.
I swear, every time I see this video at the gym, none of this gushiness is able to bring me any emotion, it is as if the band was recruiting colossal efforts to put up a redundant self-parody of itself