Coldplay: The Concert: The Concept

What’s up internet readers. I’m looking forward to bringing you my own rants about music, sure to occasionally be overly harsh or disgustingly glorified. Naturally, in my first entry on a blog about music in Burlington, I’m going to write about my weekend trip to… Jersey. A state so vilified at our fine institution, the University of Vermont, that the Student Government Association sold shirts last year that simply read “Don’t Jersey Vermont,” and did quite well doing so.

Coldplay is far from my favorite band in the world, but with their current popularity it’s impossible for a music fan and occasional radio listener to have not heard a decent amount of their stuff. When the opportunity to spend Labor Day weekend at the Jersey Shore with my roommate drinking, hitting the beach, and seeing Coldplay with his older sisters and some friends fell into my lap, I couldn’t pass it up.

The concert was Saturday night, September 3rd, at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel. The venue is an outdoor amphitheater with covered seats and an uncovered lawn section behind and above it, banked towards the stage. Parking is just outside and the lot was a mixed crowd. There were families, groups of teens getting dropped off in their parents minivans, and the twenty and thirty-something’s, tailgating and making up the largest group of fans.

We took up some seats in the lawn after a long stint in the parking lot taking down some suds and pizza. After a weak opener, Coldplay took the stage to a loud ovation and rocked out…. well…. to the extent that they can do such a thing. They played the big ones: Yellow, The Scientist, Speed of Sound, and Clocks. They changed a lyric in Politik to allude to helping New Orleans which was cool. Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash was completely unexpected and well done. The fact that they played a cover at all came as a huge surprise to me, and I commend them for doing it. As can be expected from such a big mainstream band, they were tight as hell and thus sounded very much like they do in studio. A concert style which I am usually not a fan of, yet, with the intricacies of their songs, I liked how tight they were musically. The energy of the concert was surprisingly high despite the primarily calming music they play.

The lights were mesmerizing mixed with the harmonies of the music. We saw most of the show via the multiple big screens fixed on the outside of the seating section. The mix of strobes and spotlights coming from different directions danced across Chris Martin, the lead singer, all night. Watching the screens was like seeing a music video, an effect more a product of the millions of lights than the camera work.


I was struck by a video montage Coldplay showed, prior to their set, of the Third World, overlaid by words attacking fair trade agreements as not truly being fair trade. This is a position I agree with and I liked the fact that they dimmed the lights to get everyone’s attention, and then broadcast such a message before taking the stage. After seeing his, I realized that they don’t attempt to pass on any message through their music directly and I hadn’t known that they stood for much of anything. I don’t pretend to be a student of Colplay’s lyrics, but what I know of is mostly about relationships and emotions, and is muddled in abstraction. This suspicion was confirmed by Chris Martin himself in a recent article in Rolling Stone that I happened to catch the day following the concert. He said: “I’m not a lyricist,” he goes on to point out that lyrics written by someone such as Bob Dylan should be read, but his own shouldn’t, because he just writes about what he feels.

I pointed this out to my roommate, and he mentioned that not everyone wants to hear politically driven lyrics, which is absolutely true. Music is incredibly powerful as a medium for the passage of a message, but there are a few ways to use music to such an end. A band can promote certain causes off-stage or they can sing about those things and talk about them on-stage. Many do both. Many do one or the other. It’s impossible to argue which is the best approach. Be it influencing people on stage or off, a band is using the fact that thousands, or even millions of people pay attention to them, in order to get a point across. Many people in the mainstream of Americana can be turned off to politically driven lyricism and a band may gain a broader number of listeners by not incorporating world issues into their lyrics. An obvious exception is Green Day who are more popular than ever based on songs such as “American Idiot,” which I interestingly happened to catch as the background music as CBS faded to commercial during coverage of the PGA Tour Championship (golf) this year. Yet, Green Day is an exception. Many of the punk bands I loved in my youth spoke nothing but politics and are completely ignored by the mainstream. That’s not to say that their obscurity isn’t mostly a product of their style of music and extreme stances on issues, but I think it shows that more often than not, bands that express their politics very outwardly through their lyrics are only popular in certain (small) circles these days. While the logical progression here would lead to discussing bands putting across stances which some agree with and some don’t, and the impact it has on their popularity (see Dixie Chicks), but that’s an issue for another day.

I don’t condone or condemn Coldplay’s approach, primarily because I don’t know which approach I think is best. They are spreading a message. I couldn’t imagine Yellow hitting home with a driving message while maintaining the same melancholy flow. Yet, Martin could do better than incorporating the word yellow into the song because that is the color of the phonebook, something I’ve heard he did. Music is music, and should be enjoyed without the listener made to feel guilty about something. But, with so many problems in the world and so many people who turn a blind eye, musicians need to help get the word out.

Coldplay ended the concert with Fix You, a song Martin wrote for his wife, Gwyneth Paltrow, after her father died. The song starts out very slow and midway through breaks into a faster riff. The first guitar plays an energetic high melody with continuous fast picking and when the second guitar kicks in, accompanied by a raucous drum rhythm, the blend of guitar, drum, and piano is very powerful. I must too say, the lyrics fit the song very well.