Some that you recognize, some that you’ve hardly even heard of

The thread we had this weekend on the Coldplay kiss-cam fiasco led predictably to a lot of jokes about how the real scandal was being caught at a Coldplay concert etc. So just a few thoughts about related matters:

(1) I really hate aesthetic snobbery. I really like Mozart’s Requiem, and I really like Carl Douglas’s Kung Fu Fighting, and I don’t think either preference needs any defense, although I wouldn’t say I like these two things in the same way or for the same reasons. The Requiem and Kung Fu Fighting have both given innumerable people real pleasure and intensely meaningful memories — the pain of an old wound — and really it’s hard to make a better contribution to society than that.

I think it’s good to remember — reading YouTube comments is good for this — that there are countless pieces of music or film or what have you that may mean nothing to you, or that you may actively dislike, that nevertheless are of immense value to other people, whether for “legitimate” aesthetic reasons, whatever those might be, or for reasons of personal biography/nostalgia or what have you. In any event, in what seems like an increasingly dark world, art of every type is one of the most important sources — maybe the most important — of meaning, sanity, comfort, community, and so forth.

(2) I think I could identify maybe four (?) Coldplay songs, although they have a pretty distinctive sound, so I bet I could recognize a lot of their music that I haven’t even heard, which is practically all of it. Which is to say I have no particular opinion about the band itself, but I am struck by a couple to me amusing demographic facts. First, for a late boomer like myself (age 65), Coldplay will always be a “new” band, although they were formed nearly 30 years ago, and became huge a quarter century back now. To put this in context, Coldplay is at the same chronological stage of its career now that the Rolling Stones were in 1990, and by 1990 the Stones had been the very epitome of dinosaur rock for at least if a decade if not longer. (Funny side note: Allen Bloom is obsessed in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) with Mick Jagger, when it would be difficult to be more passe among the Cool Kids than Mick Jagger was in 1987. And Mick Jagger is still a huge celebrity and performer nearly 40 years later! That’s the baby boom for you in a nutshell.

(3) It does seem to me that the guitar-driven rock that was so dominant from the mid-60s through, I don’t know, maybe Nirvana, has really faded in cultural centrality. I mean Coldplay is a massive band in that world, has sold 100 million+ records, sells out stadiums regularly, and there were a whole lot of people in that thread who were all “who is Coldplay?” I don’t think that would have been the case at all with a similarly big band in the genre 35 years ago (again the fame of the Rolling Stones is an obvious contrast).

(4) I had a fourth point but I can’t remember it now.