Friday, October 14, 2005

I'm currently reading this fabulous book, Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs , by Chuck Klosterman, a writer for Spin magazine. As soon as I finished the first chapter, I knew I had fallen in love. Well, maybe not LOVE but a very strong case of LIKE. The first chapter goes into his view on what he calls 'fake love' and how every woman loves John Cusack. He goes on to say that its not John Cusack the person that we supposedly love, its Lloyd Dobler - his character from the fabulous movied Say Anything.... Can't ya just see him standing there with the boom box blaring Peter Gabriel?
So is this true? Does every woman want a Lloyd Dobler? Do they want what Klosterman calls an "optimistic, charmingly loquacious teenager"? Yes and no. But thats another story for another time.
Klosterman writes: "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 sould like Sam Malone and Diane Chambers. They think everything will work out perfectly in the end (just like it did for Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones and Nick Hornby's Rob Fleming), and they don't stop believing, becuase Journey's Steve Perry insists that we should never do that. 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."
Do I want a love like a Coldplay song? To be honest, I've never gotten a love vibe from anything by Coldplay. If anything, it makes me a little depressed - is that what love is supposed to feel like? If so, I'll have no part in that, thank you very much. Love shouldn't require 20 mgs of Prozac and a tab of Xanax which is exactly what I need after I listen to Coldplay. Maybe I'm interpreting their music wrong - maybe I just don't listen as intently to the words as I should. But, I just don't care. Its the whole melody. (Ugh...Yellow just came on the radio) Unfortunately, some of the music by one of the best bands of all time, REM, makes me feel the same way. (They're playing on the radio now)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i kinda think of coldplay as "working melancholia".. that is, melancholia i listen to when i'm working..