Roarific The Power of Language Change Was I in Arcadia or Alhambra? Was I speeding past Temple City or City of Industry? Somewhere amid the grind and spurt of traffic on a southern California freeway, I slipped a Coldplay disc, X&Y, into my car's CD player. The morning sun lit up the distant, snow-clotted San Gabriel Mountains, a prospect as exhilarating as the opening song, "Square One." As the lead singer, Chris Martin, evoked discovery, travel and the future, his tenor voice seemed to soar high above the choking swarm of vehicles; half consciously I swerved into the fast lane. But Martin's tone soon darkens. Several of the cuts demonstrate loss, regret, uncertainty, and apprehension about what the days after tomorrow hold in store for us. An SUV was maintaining an aggressive stance inches behind my license plate, and I pulled back into one of the middle lanes. The CD reached its fifth track: a haunting, nine-note melody, repeated softly, then with a surge of percussive volume. Martin sings about his fear of the future, his need to speak out.
When an early attempt at reassurance fails, he probes deeper, asking if "you," his brother, feel incomplete or lost. The song is called "Talk." To the underlying rhythm of a drummed heartbeat, its lyrics summon up an anxiety specific to words and meaning: the feeling that other people are addressing him in a language beyond his grasp. It's as though language has lost its ability to connect us as though we've misplaced a key that would allow us, somehow, to understand what words have come to mean. Birds kept flying somewhere above Walnut or Diamond Bar, but all utterance now seemed strange, unfathomable. The guitar riffs swooped and rose to match the breathtaking, lethal grandeur of the California freeways, yet the song's lyrics were bleak. Back home in Montreal, I found myself continually listening to X&Y. So were millions of other people in dozens of countriesthis had been the world's top-selling album in 2005.
One day I came across a futuristic, B-movie-like video of "Talk"; it showed the perplexed band trying to communicate with a giant robot. A version of the video on the YouTube website had been watched more than 442,000 times in the previous ten months. Many hundreds of viewers had posted comments. Some of them were brief, uninhibited love letters. ace this song iz wick id lol ace vid, wrote a viewer from Britain. coldplay is the BEST!! added a thirteen-year-old Finn, using a Japanese screen name. vid. is kind of err.
but the song is roarific, noted an American. A comment in English from China followed one in Basque from Spain and one in Spanish from Botswana. If I were more of a joiner, I might have signed up for the official Coldplay.com online forum, which boasts tens of thousands of members. The forum makes national borders immaterialLatvians and Macedonians, Indonesians and Peruvians, Israelis and Egyptians all belong. To them it doesn't matter that the band consists of three Englishmen and a Scot singing in a tongue that was once confined to part of an island off Europe's coast. Now, wherever on the planet these fans happen to live, music connects them. So does language.
As long as they're willing to grope for words in the accelerating global language that Coldplay speaks, the forum gives all its members a chance to speak. Which is how the fifth song on X&Y ends. Martin admits that things don't make sense any longer. But as the melodies collapse around him, he invites us to talk. All sorts of borders are collapsing now: social, economic, artistic, linguistic. They can't keep up with the speed of our listening, of our speaking, of our singing, of our traveling. Borders could hardly be less relevant.