Coldplay are twice as good as radiohead!
That isn't saying much!
is that a joke?
No, I happen to think that radiohead are the worst headlining band in the world. It's all bland crappy mope-rock. The only difference between the two bands is that coldplay has a higher hit-rate from album to album and doesn't have shitty pretentious instrumentation on every song. Oh and coldplay know how to make a song finish, so they've got that going for them aswell. Almost all radiohead songs overstay there welcome
Wow umm I pretty much disagree with everything you said there...firstly, in terms of lyrical content and instrumentation, Radiohead is far, far superior to Coldplay.
Here is an example of a radiohead lyric...
"I laugh until my head comes off"
Hey, I see what you mean. WHAT DEPTH! WHAT INSIGHT! OH MY GOD IT'S BETTER THAN YEATS!
Radioheads lyrics are shit, lazy nonsense that only get away with being terrible because they masquerade as being abstract. Real abstraction means something has multiple meanings as opposed to no meaning whatsoever. Read that line again, it's not even a metaphor for anything, it's not clever, it's just stupid. If you've ever listened to the lyrics in a radiohead song they constantly veer so far off topic I've come to believe that Thom Yorke has ADHD. He is incapable of writing a song about any one thing or even similar subject matter and always seems to give up less than halfway through.
As for the instrumentation, just because it's different doesn't mean it's good. In fact it's persistently jarring and terrible. Radiohead define themselves as an "experimental" band and so they have to constantly prove how "different" and "alternative" they are. Seeing as they can't do anything remotely interesting with their songwriting, the best way to do this is with retatrded instrumentation. Nine tenths of the instrumentation on A-Kid fails. I don't know how any of those ideas got past the production stage. I presume they think that stuffing some badly played horns at the wrong tempo into a rock song for two minutes is subverting genre, but the only reason no-one has done it before is because it sounds awful.
They're not even in the same league. Like I don't know how anyone who's actually listened to OK Computer could even consider it a contest. And "shitty pretentious instrumentation" you say...well not everything needs to be pared back and minimalist (although many Radiohead songs actually are). But if you want a prime example of "shitty pretentious instrumentation", go treat your ears to the bombast of Viva La Vida.
No it's not in the same league. Colplay are definitely better, although they're both awful. If you lined up all the bands which are popular enough to sell out a show side by side in order of quality, coldplay would be the exact middle. They wouldn't be standing a little to the left, they wouldn't be standing a little to the right, they would be the dead centre. They are the mean average by which all other bands in the world are compared. Radiohead would be somewhere near the very end feeding off the crap left behind by everyone else, even though they play more or less the same genre of music. Minimalist instrumenation is better than instrumentation that fails and in actual fact a lot of the instrumenation on Viva La Vida works. It may be pretentious, but you can blame Brian Eno for that, at least it makes sense and works.
And who gives a fuck if it's "mope-rock", their music might explore sadness, alienation etc., but it does it in an eloquent and thought provoking way. That's not a pejorative term for me. I don't see why music expressing those emotions is any less valid than the anger or frustration a genre like punk rock is largely concerned with.
There are only two thoughts that radiohead can possibly provoke in someone listening to them.
"This shit is terrible. Why do people like this?"
And
"I am so hip for listening to this right now."
Eloquent my ass. The lyrics are jarring, the instrumenation is jarring, Thom Yorkes crappy mumbly singing voice is jarring and it all forms one big horrible annoying mess. It's less valid not because it expresses misery, but because it fails to do so and just comes out mopey, whiney and pathetic. I am a post-punk fan by the way, not a oi-punk fan, so the music I listen to probably has more to do with sadness and alienation than anger and frustration.