The reason, or one of the reasons, I enjoyed Coldplay’s most recent album was that I found it spoke to me of the problem of human-perpetrated evil. The album is titled after two songs, and these are two ways of looking at the human experience: ‘Viva La Vida,’ (live – or long live – life), ‘or, Death and All His Friends’. But baby, it’s a violent world.
The album is musically bookended by Life in Technicolor as the opening, and the dénouement of Death and All His Friends, which mirrors the former and brings the album to a circular close. Between these two, the music ebbs and flows, with many hidden tracks and titles bleeding from one into another. It is a complete thought, a forty-five minute thought, which aims to cover as much ground as possible, and to show death in as broad strokes as possible.
The first lyrical song starts us off ‘at home’ – that is, for the British band, in London. And we find the album’s theme: death (obvious from the title, Cemeteries of London), the most universal aspect of life. And the side-themes are introduced as well: love (At night they would go walking until the breaking of the day); confusion or uncertainty (which is inherent to some degree in the lyrics, I would argue); and religion, both facilitator and abrogator of violence:
God is in the houses and God is in my head
And all the cemeteries in London
I see God come in my garden, but I don’t know what he said
For my heart, it wasn’t open, not open
It is impossible to detail the subtle ways the music adds to the lyrics, or look at all the lyrics in depth. But I will attempt to hit the highlights of the album’s theme, and its chief sub-themes.
Death is present not as a man’s release in old age with his grandchildren all around him, but as war, chief of the four apocalyptic horsemen. Death is ever-present from start to finish. It is only a reminder in Lost! (Every gun you ever held went off, and I’m just waiting ’til the firing’s stopped), Lovers in Japan (Soldiers, you’ve got to soldier on), and even in a song that is at its heart about love and life being good, Strawberry Swing (Everybody was for fighting). But while in these it is peripheral, in most of the album death is front and center. 42 is a mockery of traditional comforts in the face of death:
Those who are dead are not dead
They’re just living in my head
And since I fell for that spell
I am living there as well
This ‘comfort’ only lasts as far as reality is suspended – and one can go ‘live there as well’ in the unreality of that answer. The first half of the song ridicules this secular comfort in death, but the religious comfort, which comes with the second half, fares no better. So we’ve rejected any solace in death, deciding that there is no paradigm and no thought to console us as we take a hard look at it.
Yes is unique within the album, and I think is best interpreted from the perspective of a soldier off to war, far from home, and in the throes of sexual temptation to the warm arms of a prostitute, or just a loose woman of the village. After all, how many soldiers came home to America after the Vietnam War with Vietnamese wives? Or what are the stories of WWII soldiers in France? This song explores the connection between violence and sex (not love, mind you – but sex), and why it is that those two so often go together. And the song’s title hints at what the answer to the soldier’s central question is. The music has a very eastern flair to it (the song has been compared to ‘I am the Walrus’), and steady percussive instruments throughout, making it very march-like, emphasizing the war in the background. With this in mind, the song begins:
When it started we had high hopes
Now my back’s on the line, my back’s on the ropes
When it started we were alright
But night makes a fool of us in daylight
There we were dying of frustration
Saying, Lord, lead me not into temptation
But it’s not easy when she turns you on
So stay gone
If you’d only, if you’d only say yes
Whether you will’s anybody’s guess
God, only God knows I’m trying my best
But I’m just so tired of this loneliness
Viva La Vida most of you are familiar with by now. It too explores violence, but from a different viewpoint: from that of a deposed dictator. I can very easily imagine it being sung by Louis XVI (and the album’s cover art blatantly depicts the French Revolution).
It was the wicked and wild wind blew in the doors to let me in
Shattered windows and the sound of drums, people couldn’t believe what I’d become
Revolutionaries wait for my head on a silver plate
Just a puppet on a lonely string, oh who would ever want to be king?
If we’ve looked at war as war and found it an awful thing, we’ve not asked the question of whether war may yet be a good thing when used to depose awful regimes. If we are indeed considering the French Revolution, the answer is decidedly no. Yet ‘Viva La Vida’ remains tantalizingly ambiguous and eludes any easy answer to the question.
‘Viva La Vida’ fades seamlessly into Violet Hill, which is again a song by a soldier, this time not in the middle of war, but at home looking back on it, and addressing his love, whom he knew before the war. The soldier deeply regrets going to war:
I don’t want to be a soldier
Who the captain of some sinking ship
Would stow far below
So if you love me
Why’d you let me go?
Death and war have filled his memory with unpleasantries, and destroyed his relationship with his love. The solid drumbeat of the song lets us know that while the war out in the world may have stopped, for this soldier it is a persistent reality and will not go away. And it has tainted everything.
Death is not death alone, but affects the sub-themes as well: and it makes love an intransient thing. Lovers in Japan (and also its hidden track Reign of Love, which I disliked), while a disorienting song, speaks directly about love, beginning with Lovers, keep on the road you’re on. But it’s a love under fire, it’s a love that is a joint-dreaming about escape from the present circumstances:
But I have no doubt
One day we’re gonna get out
Tonight, maybe we’re gonna run
Dreaming of the Osaka sun
And love is again, in Strawberry Swing (which sounds like an Irish jig), a wonderful thing: They were sitting, they were sitting on the strawberry swing, and every moment was so precious. But as in ‘Lovers in Japan’ there is an undercurrent to it, and here that love is alienating. Society is mentioned twice – above, I mentioned the hints of a society at war in this song; but the second mention is about the separateness of society from the lovers:
People moving all the time inside a perfectly straight line
Don’t you want to curve away, when it’s such,
It’s such a perfect day?
Why is it that the singer and his love alone see it as a perfect day? As in ‘Lovers in Japan,’ even within the rosy colors of love, there is something deeply wrong with the surrounding environment.
The perfect song to demonstrate the sub-theme of confusion, which may also be my favorite from the album, is clearly Lost! It is impossible for me to pinpoint a perspective that the song is sung from. This may even be impossible for the singer. The chorus is enough to demonstrate its inherent confusion:
I just got lost! Every river that I tried to cross
Every door I ever tried was locked
Oh and I’m just waiting ’til the shine wears off
And the singer sees no way out for anyone. There is no stop and no win:
You might be a big fish in a little pond
Doesn’t mean you’ve won
’Cause along may come a bigger one
And you’ll be lost!
As mentioned above, ‘Lost!’ alludes to war (Every gun you ever held went off), and even if it refers to a greater sense of disorientation besides war, there is no doubt that violence is one of the most disorienting factors in life. Violence may make us lost, but we know it always leads to death.
God and the concept of God come into and out of the experience of violence. I already quoted the mention in ‘Cemeteries of London’, but this is by no means the last of the album’s religious notions. The second half of 42 addresses the religious aspect of death, the afterlife:
You thought you might be a ghost
You didn’t get to heaven but you made it close
This is sung jeeringly, refusing to give in to an easy answer to death (and mocking it just as it does the secular answer). With more seriousness and a great deal more sadness, the dictator in Viva La Vida says, ‘For some reason I can’t explain, I know St. Peter won’t call my name.’ So heaven remains some unattainable thing, either through personal evils or as some sort of cruel illusion for those of us enmeshed in violence here below.
But there is more to God than varying thoughts on the afterlife. If Cemeteries of London listens to God (or fails to listen to God), the soldier in Yes cries out to God, lead me not into temptation (and as I suggested, he gives the song’s title reply ‘yes’ to temptation anyways). And so in the face of death, God remains elusive and distant, little or no help, perhaps through mankind’s own actions or inactions.
But there is more to God than the afterlife and divine-human interactions. There are human-human interactions, and how we invoke the name of God on one another. There is the cryptic biblical allusion in Lovers in Japan, Lovers, keep on the road you’re on, runners ’til the race is run – at least, I cannot figure what else the runners could refer to, and this is a Pauline metaphor deeply entrenched in Western thought. And much more negatively, in Violet Hill, God can be used to propagate war:
Was a long and dark December
When the banks became cathedrals
And the fog became God
Priests clutched onto Bibles
Hollowed out to fit their rifles
And the cross was held aloft
Clearly we are not expected to believe that this violence is what God, if there is a God, would want. But if there is some God, he seems notably absent in the face of wicked men speaking about him, and emptying out their religious icons for the purpose of perpetrating war and death, and nothing is said here beyond the farcical mask of God used by men.
The last song of the album, Death and All His Friends, begins with what I suspect is a lyrical coda to Strawberry Swing before beginning a full minute and a half crescendo to what is the album’s musical and lyrical climax. Starting at home in London and going abroad to view man’s many ills in war and death, and seeing how this affects our relationship with others, our sense of order and meaning, and our sense of religion, this climax is finally conclusion, reflecting upon everything that we’ve surveyed before. What possible reply could there be to all of this? The music reaches its highest point:
No, I don’t want to battle from beginning to end
I don’t want to cycle or recycle revenge
I don’t want to follow death and all of his friends
This is the only answer a sane person can have to the world, but it is hopelessly incomplete. How does one not follow death and all of his friends, given how entrenched we have seen violence is in the world? It’s a strong statement, but a statement by one man in one society among many societies, and its reach may not ever go beyond the man who speaks it. But he seems to realize this, because in the final tail of melody, coming off the album’s mountain where the denouncement of death is given, in the music reprising ‘Life in Technicolor’ and bringing the album to a close we hear the soft realization of this futility: And in the end, we lie awake and we dream of making our escape. In the end what can we do in the face of such death? But the force and intensity of the preceding conclusion is too strong to leave it willingly as a daydream, and I am left with a stupefying tension between the evil of death and war and the seeming impossibility of stopping it.
I have often spoken about these sorts of things with a friend of mine, and we both have realized that the problem is humanity. Humanity is the reason for violence and the manner in which death reigns in the world. And I, in my better moments, might say that humanity can also be the solution. Every once in a while I see in individual people and even in history the darker side of humanity put away and a side that is beautiful come out to demonstrate that a different world is possible, and that humanity can truly contribute to the good there is in the world. But the darker side is so much greater, and seems to have done so much more, and it is only in my better moments that I think humanity has anything in it worth saving or worth praising. The greater amount of time we just appear a sorry species that has managed only to bring damage to anything we have ever touched, and an even greater sorrow among ourselves. Is there really any solution? But I can at least say that I will not battle from beginning to end, I will not cycle revenge, and I will not follow along behind death, and all of his friends. But I am hopelessly fond of humanity, and I want to see them succeed.
