Coldplay – Life in Technicolor

When I first heard that France has some peak body that oversees how its language is going, I must confess I had bit of a chuckle — talk about precious. I mean, who really cares if there’s no Gallic word for ‘blue jeans’ or that some snooty Parisienne boulangerie has been taken over by Starbucks (what’s French for ‘Berry Chai Tazo Tea Infusion’?). Do we care that shop assistants are finishing every sentence with the word ‘today’ (How can I help you today? Is there anything else today?)? Does it matter that mall rats the world over wear gangsta rap denim around their knees and Wu-Tang puffer jackets? Should we be surprised that the execrable Two and a Half Men is the most popular comedy on television? What’s the problem with billions of column inches being devoted to Angelina Jolie’s every move?
Well… I’m coming around to the thinking of our amphibious friends. Sure, the Frogs are fighting for their very cultural survival (where do you speak French other than France… apart from a couple of specks in the Pacific and Eskimoland?) but it seems to me like a good time to draw a line in the sand.
Why now? The Yanks are on their knees, so let’s give ‘em a good kicking. The country’s bankrupt and it seems like their time as the pre-eminent imperial power is on the wane. So let’s say ‘no’ (or ‘non’) to the procession of homogenous genero-pop that’s coming out of the major label US record company sausage machine.
Case in point: there I was noodling around in iTunes’ music video section, when I spotted some useless piece of twaddle from some 14-year-old called Jesse McCartney. I thought, “right, that could be amusing for this issue’s Video Watch”, but I have to confess I simply couldn’t bring myself to hit the space bar. It instantly became bleedingly obvious that I would never, ever, get those four minutes of my life back and I wouldn’t even swap the Pulitzer Prize for Best Satirical Music Video Column for those four minutes. It’d be more fun to be put into an induced coma; I’d rather relive my flight last year back from Vegas where I spent eight hours with my head in the stainless steel loo; I’d prefer to go back to mid-puberty Year 9 where we had to go through the mortifyingly embarrassing ordeal of asking a girl in the class to a ‘formal’; I’d rather be back in London as a student when I missed the last train home and had to wander around Kings Cross without any money for five hours. In fact, I could bundle up all of my life’s most tedious, most embarrassing, most painful, most unfortunate episodes and I still wouldn’t trade them in exchange for four minutes of this egregious, trumped up little (I’m sorry, there’s no other word for it) turd.
Then, like some bracing British breeze comes Life in Technicolor. How amazing is this vid? Superb. Every aspect of a stadium gig is brilliantly recreated in a village fete Punch & Judy puppet show. It’s brilliantly observed, from the roady’s butt cleavage to Chris Martin’s stage dive, to the pyrotechnics, to the guitar wielding histrionics, to the chopper ride at the end of the show.
Thank goodness there’s more to life than America.