2000 - Yellow, Coldplay

'And the stars look very different today'

I'm not sure where this is going so bear with me. It seems to me that there's an honesty about 'good' art. I'm not talking about factual honesty, the actual correctness of what is being stated. Nobody really believes that there are four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire (and I should know as I work in Blackburn). It's not even about whether the singer is telling the truth; when Michael Stipe sings that 'this one goes out to the one I love' we know that this isn't factually true and that the last thing the singer feels for this person is love. What I'm trying to say is that, for a song to work you have to believe it. I believe Michael Stipe; I believe John Lennon. But I don't believe Chris Martin. Why is that?

It's the lyrics, and particularly that first verse;

     Look at the stars  

     Look how they shine for you 

     And everything you do 

     Yeah, they were all yellow

Now either Chris Martin has never actually looked at the stars (and that's possible; I'm sure rich and famous rock stars have more important things to do than look at things. He probably has someone to do it for him) or he just needed a word that fitted and yellow seemed as good as any. There is a third possibility, that I'm just stupid and so I'm missing the deeper metaphorical meaning behind the lyrics. So maybe, metaphorically, the stars are all yellow. But I don't think so. Because honestly, categorically, and even to someone like me who is colour blind, stars are not all yellow - some of them are, in fact many of them are, but others are red, or blue, or white.

And they were all yellow?

"So what?" you cry. "Who cares? I never really listen to the lyrics anyway. All I'm bothered about is the sound. Do I like the sound?" I used to be in a band with a bass player who was into a lot of lates seventies and early eighties post-punk bands (The Pop Group, Public Image, Magazine, Young Marble Giants) and we would sometimes get into arguments about a particular song. He would love it because of the overall sound while I would be complaining that the song didn't work, the lyrics didn't make sense. I once read that Paul McCartney, when he was writing Yesterday, before he came up with the final lyrics he would sing 'scrambled egg' to the tune. It was a sort of placeholder for the eventual words. I wonder how many copies it would have sold if he left the original lyric?

There was another song around the same time that also got me going (the boy's on a bit of a rant here, maybe a bucket of water over the head would cool him down). I think it was called something like Secret Smile and the line that wound me up went something like this;

    

    'Nobody knows it but you've got a secret smile and you use it only for me'

What can you say? Is this man so arrogant, or so naive, that he believes he knows his significant other so well that he can guarantee that they only employ that smile when he's around? I bet they're flashing it all over the place; in McDonalds, Next, at the pub, everywhere. Or possibly the song is meant to show that the singer is arrogant and naive..... possibly.

By the way, I looked up some of the history of Yellow and, seemingly, Chris Martin was looking for a word that fit the song he was writing and noticed a copy of Yellow Pages. Bingo!