Hot and Coldplay

There are two kinds of people in this world: People who love Coldplay, and people who wish Chris Martin would stick a sharp pencil in his ear and wiggle it around for a half an hour.

Actually, there’s a third group of people who have never heard of Coldplay, but chances are they don’t have a particularly good internet connection in their cave, and so they’re probably not reading this right now.

I happen to belong to Group #1, which is why Monday night found me perched on the edge of an awfully steep stadium balcony, watching a very tiny Chris Martin-shaped dot coax powerful sounds from a slightly larger, piano-shaped dot. Even in the face of Coldplay’s monstrous rise to fame, and consequential overexposure, I continue to like Martin. It helps if I ignore his current Napoleon Dynamite haircut and the fact that he’s married to (and has one and a half babies with) Gwyneth “I call him ANTony Hopkins” Paltrow.

When Chris Martin speaks, the lilting British accent you forgot he had surprises you, and you suddenly remember that this world famous English band has no business popping up in the middle of Nowhere, Nebraska. Still, he was gracious with the Omaha flattery (“We can’t believe we’ve never been here before! This is like Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, where the lovers finally get together at the end, but they should have been together all along. That’s how we feel about Omaha.”) And 16,000 Omahans flattered him, with a deafening roar every twelve seconds and enough t-shirt sales to finance the launch of four small countries. Several times, he cried, “Thanks for giving us your Monday!” which I misheard consistently as, “Thanks for giving us your money!”

The band engaged the audience with a contagious excitement and visual charm. During the song “Yellow,” several giant yellow balloons fell from the sky for the audience to play with, tossing them around like enormous beach balls. When the balloons popped, they were filled with yellow and gold glitter that sprinkled down on the uplifted faces of eager fans. Said glitter probably presented a choking hazard to a few sing-along fans that had their mouths open, mid-croon, as they turned their faces upward in delight, but it looked pretty, and I couldn’t hear them choke from my seat in the rafters, so I didn’t mind.

During the ballads, I was fascinated to notice that a twinkling, sparkling sea of illuminated cell phone and digital camera screens has replaced the traditional cigarette lighters of yesteryear. At first I was mortified, and a little saddened at the intrusion of the 21st century, until I realized it was really rather beautiful, and 65% less likely to cause lung cancer.

The music was amazing. This is music I have been listening to for years and years, since before “Yellow” caused radio deejays to predict the band a one-hit-wonder, and far before “X & Y” caused Chris Martin to predict himself the next Bono. It’s also music that holds intricate memory associations from very important moments in my life. When I first went away to college to deal with the terrifying and invigorating freedom of Life After Home, confronted with the crazy stresses of academic exhilaration, I used to hole up in the campus’ Print Shop very late at night to work on my art. The little workshop would be empty of people, but filled with the overpowering smells of ink and copper and alcohol and mineral spirits. I would be elbow-deep in oils, with my hair piled messily on top of my head, more colors on my apron than my prints. I would have five deadlines the next day, and three more the day after that, and I’d have unfinished papers back at my room and a test I wasn’t ready for the next week. But when I got into that shop, I would toss Coldplay’s “Parachutes” into the sad little CD player, and I would take a deep breath and just…create.

During those college years, anytime I needed to relax and forget about the batty roommates and the masochistic professors, Coldplay calmed me down. It was always there, utterly reliable, and five years later, in another school, in another state, as I drove to my college graduation and pondered the meaning of Life After School, I popped “Parachutes” into the car’s CD player to stave off hyperventilation and keep myself from aspirating my tassel.

All of this is to say that musically, Chris Martin and his boys had a very high standard to live up to in my mind last night. And to my sheer, giddy delight, they surpassed all expectations. The music was intensely beautiful, and the show was engaging. And even though I was high enough in the nosebleed section to wonder briefly about the ratio of oxygen to air particles, I couldn’t have been closer to the music if the stage were in my sinuses.

That was a good show.