The Search For Meaning In Coldplay

It's good to see that avant-garde attitudes still prevail in British pop. Those futurist provocateurs at the NME seem troubled, even a little shocked, by the new Coldplay sleeve. It's a bit ... abstract, they complain, for all the world like the Daily Mail.

The designers, Mark Tappin and Simon Grofton, have created a digital logo which echoes every modernist school of painting from suprematism to De Stijl. They themselves cite 1940s mathematical abstraction. To the NME and the websites apparently obsessed with this image, it is, however, a cross between The Da Vinci Code and Fermat's last theorem: the great brain-teaser of our time. Is it phallic? Is it a coded celebrity portrait? Guys, guys - have you thought of asking: is it art?And to think that pop is supposed to be once again the natural home of art-school poseurs. So lacking in pose are Coldplay's exegetes that they are happy to come across as crass bourgeois realists for whom everything has to have a "message". Have they never seen DA Pennebaker's film Don't Look Back, with that excruciating moment when the English journalist asks Bob Dylan through stiff upper lips what his "message" is? That man looks hip compared to the author of the NME's column.

Abstract - as in non-figurative, not-representational: is that such an impossible concept? I mean, what do you do when someone gives you a birthday present wrapped in ripoff Damien Hirst spot paper? Spend all day trying to decipher it?

The actual look of the Coldplay cover is retro: it resembles the art-rock covers of yesteryear, from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon to Joy Division's Closer. It is redolent of Kraftwerk or, less nobly, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and of an entire tradition of pop as art, as opposed to art as pop. In this sense it is an emphatic repudiation of 1990s idiot cult.

Or, of course, it's just possible that their original design was for a naked woman wearing a dog collar smelling a leather glove, like the cover for Spinal Tap's Smell the Glove, and - as in that case - the record company suggested something more abstract.

Source: Guardian