Viva La Coldplay

I don't remember where I saw the appellation "the second-best band in the world" used to describe Coldplay. I also don't remember whether the first was specifically identified. But when I repeated the description to a friend, he asked, "the first-best is U2, right?"

Right, absolutely right.

To be fair, I think the title of best band in the world is absolutely meaningless. Do you prefer bananas or sausage pizza? It depends on the time of day, what I've had recently, what I'm doing later. I keep coming back to a handful of bands and artists -- from the Beatles and Paul Simon to Rakkim and the Digital Underground, from Moby to Jefferson Airplane. Each satisfies a different craving, provides a different sort of nutrition. So I treat "best" as high praise but not a literal superlative in the world of music.

I like the "second-best" designation because it encapsulates an entire paradigm, which you have to unpack like a riddle or a graduate comps problem. When you say "Aerosmith is the best", I don't know exactly what you're using to evaluate their goodness. But a second-best is like two pointer stars in the handle of the Big Dipper; in tracing their trajectory you arrive at the superlative they strive towards.

Which is? Infectious instrumentals, tight musical structures, and lyrics expressively delivered and laced with both emotion and thought. A wide topical and emotional range of subjects and musical styles, united by a fundamental honesty and signature style.

An excellent example is Coldplay's latest single "Viva la Vida," which opens with the provocative and signatorily plaintive "I used to rule the world/ Seas would rise when I gave the word."

As the song builds image is heaped upon image in a maelstrom of metaphors. We hear the tale in first person, of a deposed or dead monarch. His is a fantastic world that blends history and mythology, but borrows most heavily from the period of Roman Empire. In this context, his boast "I used to roll the dice/ Feel the fear in my enemies' eyes" echoes Caesar's "alia jacta est".

The story stands on its own legs, but also works as an allegory for a failed relationship. Only once, tantalizingly, does the singer address the "you" who might comprise the other half of that relationship, in a refrain that is modified to omit the reference after the first refrain.

I especially like the poetically pregnant phrases scattered throughout the song. "And I discovered that my castles stand/ Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand." Completing a thought with two similar phrases -- a form of zeugma -- is as old as the Psalms, and is done masterfully here so as to evoke both the regret and sudden devastation of Lot's wife with Christ's parable of houses with foundations in sand. Both complement the growing image we are developing of the monarch.

I had a grandmother who would buy Harlequin romance novels by the shopping bag, pore through them and then exchange them for another bag. Political thrillers, memoirs, non-fiction, travel fiction, science fiction, fantasy, the classics and poetry she had no room for in the bag, just two hundred to three hundred pages with a shirtless white man embracing a swooning woman on the cover. Most of us can find some pity for the person whose reading tastes are so narrow. Are our musical tastes not equally constricted? Love may be the most musical of emotions, but a society that sings almost exclusively, as so many have, of love for God, romantic love, and love gone wrong is missing something huge. Start on my radio station and hit SEEK every time you hear a singer use the word "baby" to refer to his lover (or any name of God on a religious station). You'll break your SEEK button. (As I write this, the oldies station happily assures me "My baby loves love/My baby loves lovin'" : that's eight words, of which two are "baby", four are some conjugation of "love" and two are possessive pronouns.)

Love is worth singing about. Love gone wrong is perhaps the most universal blues subject. But these are two colors -- or one color and its anti-color -- on a vast spectrum. I seek out artists in every genre who explore the other colors: Kayne West, Pink Floyd, Lupe Fiasco, Louis Jordan, Clint Black, U2, and yes, Coldplay, I find these artists and I listen to what they have to say. Then I listen again. I identify aspects of myself in them and in them I see me.

There's nothing wrong with "second-best," and I've probably got more second-favorites than favorites. All of them point the way to perfection.