goodness overload... cannot handle.
Oct. 4th, 2008 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
intertribalUh? Do not get the hate for Viva La Vida at all. What a great album. Also, "Lost!" and "Yes" and "Death and All His Friends" are the only Coldplay songs that I've been able to add to my Ilium playlist. Ugh, I had no idea Coldplay could make such good instrumental shit.
I have this theory about Coldplay's albums (it's a personal interpretation, okay) - and it has to do with the Zen theory of water drops and expanding circles of influence (at the center is the family; the outermost is the world, etc). I mean this both in terms of the sound and the lyrics:
* Parachutes is the individual album: as evidenced by "Trouble" and "We Never Change", the lyrics are about people caught up in their own heads, obsessing over their own fears and mistakes; there's a thread of loneliness and destitution in Parachutes - and of course you can only parachute yourself, and you parachute down into an unpopulated wilderness or enemy territory.
* A Rush of Blood to the Head is the small-group album: most of the songs are very relationship-oriented - "In My Place", "God Put A Smile Upon Your Face", "Green Eyes", "A Warning Sign", "A Rush of Blood to the Head", "Amsterdam" - and sound like a hopeful but bittersweet conversation with another person. Probably because Chris Martin was all in love with Gwyneth Paltrow around now.
* X & Y is the global album: the social consciousness thread begun in the previous album by "Clocks" gets picked up in a major way in "Square One", "White Shadows", and "Twisted Logic". It's like the Human Instrumentality Project except more spiritual and positive and less literal and bad. Even when the lyrics seem to address another person they sound less emotional and more therapeutic or guiding, like a religious guide-to-life. Grand generalizations applicable the planet over abound.
* Viva La Vida is the universal album: I'm not sure how I can describe this, but it's like when Shinji rejects Instrumentality after all (I don't know why NGE is so involved in my metaphor). We are definitely looking outward in this album, and this might be in part because of the slicker sound - but it just feels like another level (that cannot be understood?) has been transcended in songs like "Yes" and "Lost!" and "Death and All His Friends". Interestingly, the individual has been revived, but if you're heading off into space, loneliness is inevitable. Maybe it's the "only God knows" in "Yes" that makes me think this: instead of doling out advice for a ready world, it's laying down your arms and admitting your smallness before the universe.
So really, I don't know where they can go next.
Totally unrelated: WTF wikipedia? The xenomorphs do not have a hive mind! Just because they have a Queen does not mean they all share a consciousness, dumbasses. Also, why am I obsessed with xenomorphs? They're a scary fictional alien species that bleeds acid, engages in "alien interspecies rape", and chestbursts out of unlucky hosts. I mean, I would definitely kill myself if I met one. I have a feeling, though, that my fascination lies in this: "the alien's combination of sexually evocative physical and behavioral characteristics creates [according to Ximena Gallardo], 'a nightmare vision of sex and death. It subdues and opens the male body to make it pregnant, and then explodes it in birth. In its adult form, the alien strikes its victims with a rigid phallic tongue that breaks through skin and bone. More than a phallus, however, the retractable tongue has its own set of snapping metallic teeth that connects it to the castrating vagina dentata.'" Oh yeah. Sigmund Freud, analyze this shit! Also, if they really are "planet purgers", as some critics theorize them to be (used by the Space Jockeys and/or the Predators)... well, that's another point of interest, isn't it? As Lindsey says, I'm so predictable.
I have this theory about Coldplay's albums (it's a personal interpretation, okay) - and it has to do with the Zen theory of water drops and expanding circles of influence (at the center is the family; the outermost is the world, etc). I mean this both in terms of the sound and the lyrics:
* Parachutes is the individual album: as evidenced by "Trouble" and "We Never Change", the lyrics are about people caught up in their own heads, obsessing over their own fears and mistakes; there's a thread of loneliness and destitution in Parachutes - and of course you can only parachute yourself, and you parachute down into an unpopulated wilderness or enemy territory.
* A Rush of Blood to the Head is the small-group album: most of the songs are very relationship-oriented - "In My Place", "God Put A Smile Upon Your Face", "Green Eyes", "A Warning Sign", "A Rush of Blood to the Head", "Amsterdam" - and sound like a hopeful but bittersweet conversation with another person. Probably because Chris Martin was all in love with Gwyneth Paltrow around now.
* X & Y is the global album: the social consciousness thread begun in the previous album by "Clocks" gets picked up in a major way in "Square One", "White Shadows", and "Twisted Logic". It's like the Human Instrumentality Project except more spiritual and positive and less literal and bad. Even when the lyrics seem to address another person they sound less emotional and more therapeutic or guiding, like a religious guide-to-life. Grand generalizations applicable the planet over abound.
* Viva La Vida is the universal album: I'm not sure how I can describe this, but it's like when Shinji rejects Instrumentality after all (I don't know why NGE is so involved in my metaphor). We are definitely looking outward in this album, and this might be in part because of the slicker sound - but it just feels like another level (that cannot be understood?) has been transcended in songs like "Yes" and "Lost!" and "Death and All His Friends". Interestingly, the individual has been revived, but if you're heading off into space, loneliness is inevitable. Maybe it's the "only God knows" in "Yes" that makes me think this: instead of doling out advice for a ready world, it's laying down your arms and admitting your smallness before the universe.
So really, I don't know where they can go next.
Totally unrelated: WTF wikipedia? The xenomorphs do not have a hive mind! Just because they have a Queen does not mean they all share a consciousness, dumbasses. Also, why am I obsessed with xenomorphs? They're a scary fictional alien species that bleeds acid, engages in "alien interspecies rape", and chestbursts out of unlucky hosts. I mean, I would definitely kill myself if I met one. I have a feeling, though, that my fascination lies in this: "the alien's combination of sexually evocative physical and behavioral characteristics creates [according to Ximena Gallardo], 'a nightmare vision of sex and death. It subdues and opens the male body to make it pregnant, and then explodes it in birth. In its adult form, the alien strikes its victims with a rigid phallic tongue that breaks through skin and bone. More than a phallus, however, the retractable tongue has its own set of snapping metallic teeth that connects it to the castrating vagina dentata.'" Oh yeah. Sigmund Freud, analyze this shit! Also, if they really are "planet purgers", as some critics theorize them to be (used by the Space Jockeys and/or the Predators)... well, that's another point of interest, isn't it? As Lindsey says, I'm so predictable.
