News / anniversaries
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1 min read
18 years of Viva la Vida, still wearing the costume
Read more . . . →18 years ago today, Coldplay released Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. It still sucks. This was supposed to be the brave one — the big reinvention. They put a Delacroix painting of an actual revolution on the cover, zipped themselves into surplus-store military jackets, and hired Brian Eno to scuff up the corners. Then they handed in the most focus-grouped record of the decade. You cannot cosplay as the barricades and write songs engineered to play under a phone commercial at the same time. The title track is a man who has never lost anything in...
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1 min read
Viva la Vida turns 18 and it still sucks
Read more . . . →18 years ago today, Coldplay released “Viva la Vida.” It still sucks. The Wikipedia-history crowd absolutely ate this one up. Chris Martin whispered vaguely about kings and castles over a string section he definitely didn’t write, and the entire planet decided it was profound. It’s not. It’s a pub quiz answer dressed as an anthem — three minutes of someone else’s history lesson, and the world called it the song of the year. The Grammys agreed. The Grammys are also frequently wrong. It took Brian Eno to make Coldplay sound this expensive, and they still ended up in court over...
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