A Rush of Bright Lights to All Your Friends: Annivyrsary 2002
ISSUE #212
A Rush of Blood to the Head turns twenty years old on this very day. Coldplay’s monster blockbuster—and in the years since? They are, notoriously, the lamest band in the world. Critics ragged on them for their vague, platitudinous lyrics; for their pompous, antiseptically perfect wall of sound; for their obvious cribbing from U2’s playbook. Swoony teenagers and their frazzled parents love them for their inoffensive, earnest lyrics; their meticulous, luscious production value; for their spot-on homage to the U2’s grandeur. Coldplay sold a ton of shit and somehow took even more of it.
In 2002, I was listening to All That You Can’t Leave Behind from the backseat of a minivan while I flipped through the pictures in Nintendo Power. I thought all songs debuted through Now That’s What I Call Music! I was Coldplay’s perfect mark—I had no idea what a cliché even was. I bought the album’s piano sheet music and ran home to play “The Scientist” every day after school. I worked out all the guitar tabs. I made a damn music video with Windows Movie Maker. I was a ‘Play Boy and I was proud of it.
Listening to A Rush of Blood to the Head today reveals its thorny legacy. It’s not nearly as bad as I’d been led to believe—it doesn’t look as good as, say, Arcade Fire’s Funeral, but it’s not so far off—but there wasn’t the masterpiece I’d hoped would be hidden in there. “Clocks” remains one of the weirdest songs in history, toeing an uncanny line between muzak and queasy soundscape. “In My Place” was a little cheaper than I’d remembered. But “Politik” harkens back to their debut’s “Don’t Panic,” an uneasy verse and chorus that blossoms during an upturned bridge and goes out emo-style on a swell of crash cymbals. I liked that one better this time—they’d actually, ahem, understood the assignment.
Emo was exactly what Coldplay ended up priming me for. Reeling through puberty from their heart-on-my-sleeve ballads, I fell straight into the arms of Taking Back Sunday. 2002 debuted a trio of emo giants: Tell All Your Friends, Coheed & Cambria’s The Second Stage Turbine Blade, and I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. All three would become Jeffrey Staples, but Taking Back Sunday took the favorite-band crown from Coldplay once I’d learned how good it felt to scream (Adam Lazzara taught me to sing, which is why I never use my nose). But where Chris Martin was vague in verse, Lazzara and John Nolan were specific and clever, like the “So sick of being tired” / “So tired of being sick” of “You Know How I Do,” one of my favorite album openers.
Taking Back Sunday has never been cool. Neither has Coldplay. Different approaches, same effect. There’s no world where they’d be called out like at the end of LCD’s “Losing My Edge,” which—along with Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights—defined New York Cool for the next fifteen years. In 2002, when music became free and blogs reigned supreme, the combination of access and transparency made people paranoid about listening to what’s cool—no one wanted to get caught with Avril on their iPod. But how cool is cool after twenty years? Interpol’s string of diminishing returns looks just as silly as Coldplay’s, and LCD’s half-retired hiatus stunt leaves me with nothing but a sigh.
Losing your edge is no true threat. Time warps everything after all. Keep a level head and hold fast to what you love—and don’t take shit from anybody.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.