Fake love is a very powerful thing. That girl who adored John Cusack once had the opportunity to spend a weekend with me in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria, but she elected to fly to Portland instead to see the first U.S. appearance by Coldplay, a British pop group whose success derives from their ability to write melodramatic alt-rock songs about fake love. It does not matter that Coldplay is absolutely the shittiest fucking band I've ever heard in my entire fucking life, or that they sound like a mediocre photocopy of Travis (who sound like a mediocre photocopy of Radiohead), or that their greatest fucking artistic achievement is a video where their blandly attractive frontman walks on a beach on a cloudy afternoon. None of that matters. What matters is that Coldplay manufactures fake love as frenetically as the Ford fucking Motor Company manufactures Mustangs, and that's all this woman heard. "For you I bleed myself dry", sang their blockhead vocalist, brilliantly informing us that stars in the sky are, in fact, yellow. How am I going to compete with that shit? That sleepy-eyed bozo isn't even making sense. He's just pouring fabricated emotions over four gloomy guitar chords, and it ends up sounding like love. And what does that mean? It means she flies to fucking Portland to hear two hours of amateurish U.K. hyperslop, and I sleep alone in a $279 hotel in Manhattan, and I hope Coldplay gets fucking dropped by fucking EMI and ends up like the Stone fucking Roses, who were actually a better fucking band, all things considered.
Not that I'm bitter about this. Oh, I concede that I may be taking this particular example somewhat personally – but I do think it's a perfect illustration of why almost everyone I know is either overtly or covertly unhappy. Coldplay songs deliver an amorphous, irrefutable interpretation of how being in love is supposed to feel, and people find themselves wanting that feeling for real. They want men to adore them like Lloyd Dobler would, and they want women to think like Aimee Mann, and they expect all their arguments to sound like Sam Malone and Diane Chambers. They think everything will work out perfectly in the end (...). In the nineteenth century, teenagers merely aspired to have a marriage that would be better than that of their parents; personally, I would never be satisfied unless my marriage was as good as Cliff and Clair Huxtable's (or at least as enigmatic as Jack and Meg White's).
Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no "normal", because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can't compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door, because they're probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller. Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool. The best relationship I ever had was with a journalist who was as crazy as me, and some of our coworkers liked to compare us to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. At the time, I used to think, "Yeah, that's completely valid: We fight all the time, our love is self-destructive, and – if she was mysteriously killed – I'm sure I'd be wrongly arrested for second-degree murder before dying from an overdose". We even watched Sid & Nancy in her parents' basement and giggled the whole time. "That's us", we said gleefully. And like I said – this was the best relationship I ever had. And I suspect it was the best one she ever had, too.
(...)»
Chuck Klosterman, in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs – A Low Culture Manifesto
E já que se falou em Coldplay e Aimee Mann, deixo-a aqui a cantar a "The Scientist" (uma versão que considero bem mais bonita):
E já que se falou em Coldplay e Aimee Mann, deixo-a aqui a cantar a "The Scientist" (uma versão que considero bem mais bonita):
2 comentários:
desculpa-me, sérgio!
não resisti!
Uau.
Eu li o texto esta manhã, mas achei que precisava de o reler com mais calma antes de poder comentar decentemente.
Uau.
Nunca tinha visto as coisas dessa perspectiva. Ie, eu continuo a gostar dos coldplay (incluindo a versão original da scientist! :P) e de outras milhentas bandas que se enquadrarão nessa crítica, mas é muito verdade o que é dito ali.
Eu 'sempre' (nos últimos anos, vá) me debati com os motivos que levariam as pessoas a complicar tanto tudo, nomeadamente o 'so-called' amor. (Estas minhas tentativas de aproximação às relações devem-se um bocado a isso.)
De facto, sem que nos apercebamos, e paralelamente àqueles valores culturais tradicionais, andamos literalmente a cantar situações que acabamos por tomar como referência. Dessa forma deixamos de fazer a nossa própria avaliação das situações e do que sentimos, porque essa análise já nos é dada à partida. Agimos, então, todos, de uma forma condicionada, porque é difícil ver (quanto mais agir!) para lá desses preconceitos sobre tudo e mais alguma coisa.
Tenho feito tentativas de me afastar de ideias feitas da sociedade, mas não me tinha apercebido na forma subtil como a música, a 'minha' música, me condiciona também. Vou estar atento a isso.
Obrigado, Soares!
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