18 years ago today, Coldplay released Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. It still sucks.
This was supposed to be the brave one — the big reinvention. They put a Delacroix painting of an actual revolution on the cover, zipped themselves into surplus-store military jackets, and hired Brian Eno to scuff up the corners. Then they handed in the most focus-grouped record of the decade. You cannot cosplay as the barricades and write songs engineered to play under a phone commercial at the same time. The title track is a man who has never lost anything in his life pretending he used to rule the world, and a planet of people who’d never stormed anything decided that counted as catharsis. The jacket is a costume. The band wearing it is exactly who you always knew they were.
The part that actually gets me is the year they...