“Or Write a Song Nobody Has Sung / Or Do Something That’s Never Been Done”

Firefox devoured my 2000-word review of X&Y yesterday. I talked a lot about what sorts of influences I felt in the album (whole lot of early Bowie, golden age Cure), took a detour through the history of “hot jass,” and betrayed an embarrassingly large and detailed familiarity with the works of Phish and Dave Matthews Band. In other words, I didn’t really cry that much when it was eaten. It was a shitty review, all told, thrown together more as a gesture of “ha, ha, I know how to download shit before it’s even released” than “this is why you should buy this album.” And I would have let it slide, but then Whet decided to call me out, in a manner of speaking, after, in a private forum, connecting both my recommendation for buying X&Y with mockery of his bragging about being in first in our fantasy baseball league with an imperfect knowledge of Chicagoland auto auction television commercials.

The thing is, my review was essentially identical to the NPR review Whet mocks, and I felt there was something amiss in that. Perhaps I was influenced in part by the Blender review as well, which declares:

X&Y will make some rock fans fall apart and blubber into their hankies. Others will gag and shout “Sissy!”

That is, this album is built to generate one of two responses, and that’s pretty much it. Either you’ll like it (perhaps because it makes you “fall apart and blubber”), or you’ll hate it, since you perceive it as sentimental trash, and not groundbreaking like Pink Floyd’s OK Computer. However, that this split exists is truly very weird, and I’m upset that I even bought into it.

I was predisposed to be into X&Y because of how much I liked Coldplay’s previous album. Furthermore, my relationship with A Rush of Blood to the Head is very, very affective. The album carries special resonance for reasons that I don’t like to get into on the internets. So it’s really hard for me to separate the sentimental attachment from the musical, but I like to think that I started to like the album because I could see its potential for affective response. As in, the songs made me think of someone or of some situation that carried emotional weight. This was, then, emphasised by later developments, like reciprocity surrounding the album (”it makes you think of me? it makes me think of you, too!”). So it’s a predictive process. I lived through this with ( ), also. I felt a sentimental attachment to it, and then it got reinforced externally.

But no one is going to say that ( ) isn’t also, you know, fucking amazing. The affective response can be pushed aside by making feints to discussions of the sublime or by simply dismissing it as an external result of the historical chance of the record’s reception. It’s good, and it can stir emotional responses in you (Mary Shelley’s stated goal in Frankenstein, so it’s not without precedent). But Blender suggests that there’s something wrong with that. Why should calling Chris Martin “sissy” be anything resembling valid criticism? And is pushing aside that dichotomy to suggest that he’s doing it just for the money the solution? Blender and NPR seem to be in agreement here. Coldplay has made a weepy album that will be insanely popular, perhaps precisely because it’s weepy / melodramatic / etc.

So here’s what’s fucked up: let’s take the above as given. X&Y is weepy. You will get caught up in songs like “Fix You” or “X&Y” or my current highlight, “Talk.” Why is admitting this, then, always followed up with some kind of chest-beating nod to bullshit anti-affective tropes of art criticism, like that the album isn’t “ground-breaking” or that it’s for wimps? Come on.

To me, this seems to be where Odd Nerdrum’s discussion of kitsch could come into play (largely available in clumsy .gif format here). Nerdrum rails against the demands of the modern art community which frown on affective connection to the art. “Kitsch refers to the sensual and the timeless…the kitsch painter is committed to the eternal: love, death and the sunrise,” he explains. X&Y is, without a doubt, by Nerdrum’s compilation of definitions given by various theorists, kitsch through and through. You bet it sounds timeless. You bet it’s sensual. And that’s not bad. X&Y is good kitsch, so what “ground-breaking” means is totally unclear. How can something be ground-breaking if it’s committed to timeless archetypes? And, furthermore, isn’t, to some degree, all pop music like that? Why is that so bad?

Both reviews engage, then, in false dichotomies. Ground-breaking does not mean not popular (see: Neptunes, Timbaland). Similarly, affective does not mean without artistic merit. But they do play into a spatial relationship to art objects that, in instances like Coldplay, strike us as illegible. So you get wishy-washy middling reviews like these two, or like mine from yesterday. The last time we got to talking about aesthetics here, I landed on a movement between “good” and “interesting,” which grew out of my wondering last year about the set of things that are aesthetically valuable and those that I personally enjoy. It’s not 1:1 for me; it’s not even close—mostly since I have no eye for aesthetically valuable, and since I often just don’t even know what the general aesthetic reception of an object is ahead of time. Or, when I do, I often totally fail to see what the hubub is (OK Computer, Blonde on Blonde). This seems like a way out—a way to like Coldplay unironically and without apology. I like it since I like it. Not since it’s cool to like it, and not since I’m a sheep doing whatever Blender tells me to (though that might be hard to prove). The music generates an affective response, and I’ll let it sit at that. Any further effort at contextualising plays into a really bizarrely élitist set of interactions with the world of art that I don’t want to engage in, particularly, and one that seems especially unhelpful in this day and age. Back when we needed modern art to beat the fascists, there was value in distinguishing between the different “brows,” but now it all feels improper.

So, finally, X&Y is great. I recommend getting it. The stretch from the closing minute or so of “White Shadows” (which is a little too U2-ey for me at the start) to the end of “Speed of Sound” is astonishingly engrossing. Check it out, and then decide.