Coldplay's 'SNL' Freak-Out: Easy-Listening Performance Art, Awful, Or Both?
Whether you take or leave Coldplay mostly depends on your taste for their brand of overproduced nursery rhymes and moody rock-star glowering. But what of the megaband's performance this past weekend on Saturday Night Live, with frontman Chris Martin bounding through Studio 8A like a sort of atonal Bono? What of that insistent pitchiness and those karaoke-grade moves underscoring his most recent album's title track "Viva la Vida" — the single on which Coldplay's label EMI was counting to help rescue it from certain insolvency in 2009? In a post-Groban world where any court jester who tries hard enough can usurp his king's crown, is Martin's lunacy the un-self-conscious work of a born performer, or just another postmodern, funk-faking harbinger of SNL's obsolescence? We could go either way, though (SPOILER ALERT) the inspired back-bend at the end puts this just over the top for us every time. Team Coldplay? We think? [NBC]