Why I love the Independent

Though I still look at the Guardian when I'm trying to figure out how many massive piles of money I should be paid for taking my stunning professional self to Australia someday (their job site is the best around), I'm pleased to have switched to the Independent. The news is timely enough, and while the op-ed pieces are still pretty annoying, at least they're written above a third grade level and don't all have something to do with American actresses and celebutantes.

But what really pleased me about the Independent yesterday was an op-ed piece masquerading as an album review, or vice-versa: this vicious, delicious condemnation of Coldplay. Okay - not the hardest target in the world. But this is a message that needs to be put out there again and again until children stop getting hooked on that shit. And then reading the comments section - an activity I try to avoid, and one I chide the F-word for as he has a propensity to do it in the right-wing Australian press and then get upset about what the world is coming to - was hilarious. I know music critics must get a lot of hate for hating on what millions of people love, and I know half the comments were probably written by 12 year olds or people with the sort of hormonal disorders that will let them be:

A) Coldplay fans
B) masochistic enough to read an article entitled 'Why I Hate Coldplay'

but I could not stop giggling at them, imagining upset grown men furtively hunkered over their work computer in some grey British cubicle, writing that a professional music critic hated Coldplay because he was jealous of their success and insisting that 30 million people can't be wrong. (They can.)

So, as you can perhaps tell I hate Coldplay too. And I can't simply ignore that hate, as I ignore most of my hates, because years and years ago a guy put on their first album while I was being intimate with him and I was too polite in those days to ask him to turn that shit off. Talk about a fucking moodkiller. I felt like we were being voyeured by a mentally defective pervert who was moaning even louder than the guy I was intimatizing. A mentally defective moaning pervert who couldn't change key. It was awful. If dementia ever comes it will be bloody horrible, but with any luck at all that will be one of the first memories to go.