coldplay vs radiohead?

Remember when every rapper's favorite rock band seemed to be Coldplay? Chris Martin was the Phil Collins/Lionel Richie of the aughts. That's not a dis. But he was always better off aiming for Thom Yorke even if he didn't have the skills to get there. Once he figured out who he really was it was hell on his music - at least Adam Levine's got the vocal chops to conceal the giant stick up his ass. I don't remember what TV program it was, but long about some evening in 2011 when I heard Martin wandering off key over the bog-standard chord progression that was "Paradise," all the while trying to own the stage like Bono and, somehow, simultaneously making pass-agg "don't fuck this up, guys" hand gestures to his bandmates, it was enough to turn me off to their present and future output forever. A Rush of Blood and Viva La Vida, the only two albums of theirs I've heard in full, are both solid-to-excellent. Still haven't heard most of the debut and never really gave a shit about "Yellow," but "Trouble" is a stroke - almost on par with Lionel and the Commodores' "Easy." That's the best thing Chris Martin will ever write, and it's enough.

the 'a rush of blood to the head' title track bangs tbh

coldplay have sold 100m records, radiohead have sold somewhere in excess of 30m, so therefore coldplay are better don't @ me

you know who else sold a lot of records? hitler.

Some era defining classics in here
https://www.discogs.com/artist/223385-Adolf-Hitler

did hitler sell more records than coldplay? if so then hitler is better don't @ me

I'm really not a violent person, at all. But there's something about Chris Martin that makes me want to punch him in the face.
While there's something about Thom Yorke that makes me think someone already punched him in the face.

Anyway, I think of Radiohead as the far superior and way more interesting band, although I have to say I actually hardly know Coldplay (just some singles, I liked Clocks but never thought much of Martin's vocals); Radiohead's earlier 'classic' stuff (until and including OK Computer) tends to bore or annoy me.

i'm really not a violent person, at all. but there's something about adolf hitler that makes me want to punch him in the face.

if the new doctor who tried to dress like radiohead's album covers it would be a fucking disaster

In 2004 a Coldplay-liking friend told me about a fellow Coldplay-hater who had announced "This is brilliant, what is it?!" when 'Yellow' came on at an indie club, then slunk off when he heard the vocal come in. I sympathised as the bits of Coldplay songs that don't feature Chris Martin's vocals or lyrics are not the bits of Coldplay I object to.

yellow is such a plodding fucking dirge, i can't imagine it being anything other than an instant floor-clearer

Drake has also sold more records than Kendrick.

In fact he is officially the top certified singles artist ever with 142 million certified units. Therefore he is the GOAT.

The radiohead vs coldplay :: kendrick vs drake comparison makes more sense than I’d like to admit for a joke.

Thom Yorke's voice is more annoying than Chris Martin's voice which, given how annoying Chris Martin's voice is, is something of an achievement.

Coldplay is the Goop of rock bands.

Kendrick and Thom Yorke heights: 5’5”

Drake and Chris Martin heights: 6’1”

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

You may have just cracked the code.

Kendrick sampled Radiohead on “how much a dollar cost”

Drake sampled Coldplay on “congratulations”

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DorT2VwXgAA8qrV.jpg

to be fair Yellow sounds kind of like the Wedding Present and they are good

yellow but with david gedge as the singer

Remember when every rapper's favorite rock band seemed to be Coldplay?

this is still kinda true tbh, with some helpings of blink 182 and rhcp

coldplay better

i would be way more likely to enjoy a random coldplay song if it came on at the supermarket. the comfort of unfamiliarity and the pleasant surprise of it not being nearly the worst it could be, like 'superman' by five for fighting or something. radiohead are just completely spent for me at this point and their fans are so dim and pretentious and repellant, too much like me 15 years ago, i would try to leave as fast as possible if one if their songs came on in some public place i happened to be in.

agreed that five for fighting is the absolute worst

Listening to Coldplay is like a drawn out version of flipping through a station and hearing a song that catches your ear but then they start singing about Jesus and you change the station immediately

tho I'd much rather hear a Coldplay song than that newish "rock" song about the thunda, th-th-thunda

the english art-rock band from england called radiohead is a high quality musical quintet and they are from ENGuhlend, highly recommend "the kid a"

you may already know their song "the creep" which is about a creep who moonlights as a weirdo

it is not that great of a song but it has a part where you sing high and loud so people like to sing along even though they can't do it good, just loud

anyway if you enjoy other radiohead songs, you might like other english musicians like mark morrison or hermin's hermits

they are also from england

beavis otm

first time i listened to the coldplay album someone had burned me a copy and had switched out the title track with a guster track of the same name and i was briefly stuck in this lynch state of "how bad do i really hate this band?"

I know the casual thing to say is that Radiohead is pretentious but Chris Martin feels way more pretentious to me.

wish it were Franz Ferdinand who'd decided to become a Pop band instead, Coldplay just couldn't pull it off. they were at their best when Eno successfully helped them become art rock-lite on Viva La Vida

top 5 coldplay off the top of my head:
strawberry swing
glass of water
clocks
always in my head
chinese sleep chant

Thom Yorke Admits Vast Majority Of Musical Output Fueled By Constant Fear Of Being One-Upped By Coldplay https://t.co/jPUNPMVW2j pic.twitter.com/kFfkkaSIkf

— The Onion (@TheOnion) October 18, 2018

re: the rappers loving Coldplay thing. I always loved the Kanye line "I told Jay I did a song with Coldplay / Next thing I know he got a song with Coldplay" in Big Brother. Firstly, for being the only person to ever rhyme Coldplay with Coldplay. And secondly, for the idea that him and Jay refer to Chris Martin as 'Coldplay' in their conversations with each other.

what happened to coldplay after their 3rd release? they got too commercial for me!

spiderman and i'm stuck in the middle

I realised years ago that the reason I'd never consciously heard any Coldplay was that I always changed the channel when they came on.
This realisation came when some pub was playing a Coldplay song and it was aggravating enough that I checked what it was.

Anyway, Radiohead.

Radioplay vs Coldhead

My dad always thinks I like Coldplay when actually I like Radiohead.

can coldplay do this?

https://i.imgur.com/Z17LD2I.png

honest coldplay question: can someone put "yellow" in radiohead terms? not musically, but in terms of where that stands in their catalog.

full disclosure, i was a coldplay fan through parachutes. i liked yellow. it was all yellow. to me that was like their "creep", at the time. but the difference is, then they became U2 and made much huger songs. whereas, with radiohead, creep was creep, and although they became critically acclaimed after that, creep is still the big song for them, the one that people who weren't there for radiohead will think of first. i think.

so what is "yellow"? "pop is dead?" lol

I think “yellow” is “creep”…. they’re both their breakthrough single and performed similar in the charts - top 10 UK - barely registered in the US Charts.

Believe it or not Paranoid Android is their best charting single in the UK.

Yeah Yellow is definitely Creep

“yellow” is still a jam

Xp for real? I remember Pyramid Song charting really, surprisingly, high too

In the US: “creep” charted #34 and their second highest single is “nude” at #37.

In the UK they charted in the top 10: “paranoid android” charted #3, “no surprises” and “there there” at #4, “street spirit” and “pyramid song” at #5, “creep” at #7 and karma police #8.

Yeah “pyramid song” being a hit in the UK is weird, weirder when you consider it performed better than “creep”

I think if Kid A had any singles “idioteque” could have been their highest charting hit.

The only potential singles I can think of in the kid a/amnesiac era are “everything in its right place”, “idioteque” and “i might be wrong”… maybe “optimistic”.

Kid A seems much more radio friendly to my ears than amnesiac, their single release strategy was completely off there… I mean I suppose it worked since both albums went to #1 in the UK/US (and in pretty much every country that has charts) but Amnesiac should have been the album with no singles.

Pyramid Song being a #5 chart hit in the UK is probably just accumulated goodwill from OKC and Kid A.

Hell, even an edit of National Anthem has single potential.

Coldplay’s run of singles is surprisingly low in the US as well, I thought they were well beloved in the states, and had a run of top 10 singles similar to Maroon 5 (15 top 10 singles) but they only have 4 top 10 hits in the US (speed of sound, viva la vida, sky full of stars and “something just like this” with the Chainsmokers)

In the USA I think clocks or one of those other really shitty ones was their creep? like the mass breakthrough

Clocks was omnipresent for a long time. As a casual consumer of publicly broadcast music in the states I experienced the overplayed Coldplay chronology as Yellow > Clocks > Fix You

My boyfriends cousin played Coldplay 'in the background' the other day when we were hanging out after dinner and I was amazed how awful it was. I remember like yellow etc which was just boring or whatever but the stuff she played all sounded like boyband music, much worse than I realised.

Drake=Coldplay
Kendrick=Radiohead

These are the brave and controversial takes I come to ILM for

(But yes much agreement)

Coldplay is really the dumbest band name, like did they name themselves after a sports drink or something

Good tunes tho

no the tunes are awful as i recently learned but its more the very undignified vibe of middle aged people having 'fun' in a very ad with clips of people having a good time with [product] way.

Mostly I just think of “conscious uncoupling” when I think of this band. What is the opposite of that? “Unconscious coupling”?

I like “Don’t Panic” and “Politik” and lots of the album Viva La Vida, but when this band is bad it’s kinda the worst, an entire oeuvre built off recreating the back-to-back punch of “High And Dry” into “Fake Plastic Trees”.

Viva La Vida kinda great

incredibly great

im just pleased that its seemingly possible to go 20 years without hearing anything by these people

I’m impressed tbh, they seem inescapable in my ambience

“Yes” is like… camp. “We’re gonna cover Venus In Furs but make it commercial and bathetic… no wait, Eno wants to remind you that he really likes that last track on ‘Loveless’”

Death and all of his friends (with the life in technicolour outro) is where Coldplay peaked; drawing every ounce of goodness from their cheesy melodramatic style and distilling it into one track

The track being cheesy and melodramatic too, but such a damn ear worm that there's all the forgiveness in the world for it

And strawberry swing is just a damn fun little bop

three words when it comes to coldplay:

chinese
sleep
chant

completely different vibe, yes― but radiohead never hit on the thing that coldplay do flawlessly on that song.

so idk, call them sellouts or whatever, but bubblegum shoegaze had potential at one point. i will always defend coldplay. they had and continue to have an occasional solid jam.

Omg I never heard venus in furs in Yes, so obvious. And yeah, I'd take an album of chinese sleep chant.

Big soft spot for lovers in Japan too as it's the song that broke up the rigidity of my right-left hand partnership and I can still remember the feeling of joy learning how to play that syncopated beat on the piano to speed as a 13yo

Oh, I didn’t know what Chinese Sleep Chant was. I just thought it was “the ‘Soon’ lift that follows the ‘Venus In Furs’ lift”. It is a very lovely lift of “Soon”!

Gotta love their commitment to the 'Album'. 13 songs but 10 tracks. Three are flatsharing, but only one of them gets a mention on the back cover. And yet, Yes doesn't segue into CSS, and DAAHF doesn't segue into The Escapist, so why not mention those other two? (and, again, why not just make them separate songs?) Quite cute in how obtuse an attempt it was to clog up the iTunes/download/shuffle way of doing things.

Also yeah I'd never thought about the Venus in Furs in Yes before, good call.

Three are flatsharing

Okay should be six are but you get the point

the funny thing about them is they were actually better at doing all those art rock lifts on vlv than they are at being a pop band

Otm

I still like "Yellow" - and Mark Kermode's description in his original review for Richard Linklater's Boyhood is pretty amusing:

Even the opening strains of Coldplay's "Yellow" seem to be heard with younger, more innocent ears, as if we are listening to the song in an age before Chris Martin and co became the touchstone for all things terrible.