Last week Coldplay released a new single called “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall”. Amazon had it as a ‘free single of the day’, and Rdio also featured it. My kids and wife have some Coldplay in their collection, so I figured I would give it a spin. I started streaming it in the kitchen while my older son was having a snack, and within a few seconds my younger son appeared from upstairs and said ‘is that Coldplay’?
We barely made it through the songs, since it was as my younger son described it ‘utterly generic pop trash that sounds like everything else they have ever done but worse’. Couldn’t sum it up better. When my wife came home I tried it out on her (hey, there was the possibility of a free download if she liked it), and she was doing other stuff before the song ended and said it left absolutely no impression on her.
But a big thing for them was how Coldplay, like too many others, seems to think that by just repeating what worked before they should have the same success. But they liked some earlier Coldplay, and all this song did was remind them how much better that stuff was.
So there you go … the new Coldplay song – in my house you can’t even give it away!
And listening to them talk about how this was a generic retread of their better material reminded me of another song … the classic Talking Heads song ‘Once in a Lifetime’ from Remain in Light. That song has the great repeated line ‘Same as it ever was’ … which sums up way too much of pop music today.