Quote:
Originally Posted by octothorp
I think there are two key types of musical artists (actually this is true of a number of forms of art): innovators and refiners. I've brought this up before in terms of the classic Radiohead/Coldplay debate. Radiohead is an innovator in the purest sense: a lot of ideas, many of them sounding a bit unfinished, and at least some stuff that's a complete miss and some stuff that at least a few people (and sometimes a great many people) will find brilliant. Coldplay has an idiom - guitar and keyboard dominated british pop - that they stick to pretty religiously and attempt to produce the best pop-songs possible with that. And they're successful at it. But they're a diametric opposite to Radiohead in what they're attempting to do. Most musicians aren't one or the other. You can think of it as a scale along which every musical artist fits. One isn't superior to the other, and musical progress sort of needs both: the innovators to go ahead and forge new ground and then the refiners to come along and fill in the gaps. In my music collection, I'd consider bands like Hold Steady, The National, Peter Gabriel, Suzanne Vega, Wilco, and Ben Folds to be very good refiners; while Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, LCD Soundsystem, Pixies, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits would be some of the better innovators. Anyway, I think that refiners are sometimes called formulaic, and unfortunately that sort of detracts from the complexity or importance of what they're trying to accomplish.
|
I like your post but I disagree that Coldplay is trying to do the opposite of what Radiohead does. Radiohead while being innovative in form a lot of the time cares deeply about their content. The constantly strive to make insights in their music. Their songs often as philosophically complex as they are musically. Coldplay tries to refine Radiohead's sound into something more accessible and remove the edge from the content while maintaining the spirit of Radiohead. While fine and dandy, it's still a lesser form to Radiohead because of the loss of insight and creativity that comes from popularizing a sound. Radiohead is the superior band.
Furthermore, I think it's important to make value judgments such as "Radiohead is the superior band." Otherwise, we end up devaluing the art of music completely. If we say Let Down by Radiohead is equally as valuable as Fix You by Coldplay, we devalue Radiohead's more complex and honest content by not distinguishing it from the more simplistic and kitschy Fix You. The content of both songs shouldn't be accepted as equal but put up against one another to see which has the better insights. All ideas aren't created equal and we should be able to discuss music without going back towards the "everything is equally good" BS.
I'm not saying everyone has to agree with my assessment of Radiohead and Coldplay, I'm saying it's important to make an assessment. Then others can judge and debate your assessment, which is much more productive and interesting than an "everything is subjective" conversation.