First off, I must apologize for the hiatus. I wish I could say it was planned, but alas, no. It was an unforeseen break due to a combination of normal busyness, sickness (family and personal), writing deadlines, and one other thing I hope to talk about soon. Thank you for not unsubscribing!
“When people are taxed without representation, they are at times to feel abused.” So speaks John Adams, played by Paul Giamatti, during the closing arguments of his famous defense of British troops at the center of the Boston Massacre. Therein lay an important psychological insight for understanding our times: When pushed to it, people can seek political revenge or even revolution for wrongs that are surprisingly banal.
The last eight years of American journalism have been almost singularly dedicated to one thing: Understanding (or explaining) the political ascent of real estate maven and Home Alone 2 star Donald J. Trump. You could easily spend all of 2025 reading nothing but analysis of why millions of Americans believe that Trump speaks for them. There are takes for everyone.
One theme that pops up a lot is the idea of authenticity. Trump “tells it like it is.” He’s “real.” Because he’s an outsider, not a Washington swamp creature, there is nobody (according to this narrative) holding his strings. Because of this, Trump talks more like the way the people in your house or church or Thanksgiving dinner talk, and less like the way senators and governors talk. This is for good and ill. He can say things that no other candidate will risk saying, but he also tends to say things that no other socially conscious adult should say. But—again, according to this story—this is just part of the authentic package.
I’ve always thought this narrative was overwrought. At a superficial level, yes, Trump is authentic, in the same way that rappers in the 90s, who lived in gated mansions and were more likely to start a fashion line than a gang war, said they were “authentic” because they dropped F-bombs. Much of Trump’s “authenticity” feels like calculated vulgarity, and if Trump’s insults and rants sound more like the people you know than the politicians in Washington, maybe the problem is with the people you know.
But the most enduring part of watching the Trump era has been seeing how his biggest critics have tended to prove him right. Whether or not Trump himself is authentic is beside the point, because so much that is opposed to Trump certainly is not. And after eight years, I think the best explanation for the Trump phenomenon probably is this very thing.
There is a prolonged, exacerbated spirit of phoniness throughout American culture. It’s in the water at colleges, therapy sessions, the bestseller list, daytime TV, Hollywood, and yes, politics. Trump’s calculated vulgarity is called authenticity partially because it has highlighted just how dishonest and detached from reality so many mainstream American tastemakers are. And people are turned on to Trump more or less in proportion to how turned off they are by this performative, dishonest zeitgeist.
And that brings me to Coldplay.
Few bands meant more to me in a longer season of my life than Coldplay. Their first four albums in particular are tied so closely with memories of growing up, friendship, love, etc. My wife and I have shared Coldplay for as long as we’ve been friends. There are lyrics that I find more profound as the years ago by (“In my place, in my place/ were lines that I couldn’t change / I was lost, oh yeah”), songs that capture something that feels like what Lewis called “the secret signature of the soul.” I spent one particular winter as a socially awkward teenager with my guitar in hand and their Live 2003 DVD playing on repeat, learning chord progressions I haven’t forgotten.
So what I’m about to say is not the trollish observations of someone who just doesn’t like what Chris Martin is selling. I’ve given Martin, Johnny Buckland, Guy Berryman, and Will Champion my fair share of money. I want to give them more. But I no longer believe they want it.
Their new album Moon Music is a disaster. It’s bad in many ways that could fill out a traditional album review. But that’s not what I want to focus on. Instead, I want to make a simple yet perhaps counter-intuitive point:
As a cultural artifact that reflects both a worldview and a posture, Moon Music is a symbol of why Donald Trump became President of the United States and why he very well may do it again.
I mean that. Moon Music is precisely the kind of pop culture creation that makes Trump’s political victories make sense. Moon Music reveals the world that Trump inhabits as a world of deceit, artistic apathy protected by ideological pandering, and contempt for the hopes and desires of people who don’t live and die in major cities. More than that: Moon Music, as a Coldplay album specifically, is a clear betrayal of fans. It finds Martin specifically but the group as a whole content to tell secular parables without the least bit of imagination or urgency, but ostensibly for the purpose of papering over the profound disconnect between their songs and what most people are feeling/thinking about.
Moon Music is, in fact, the kind of album that a global corporation’s A.I. software could make.
The problems on the album come quickly but they aren’t obvious right away. The opening title track is arguably the best song on the album, and gets close to poetry:
Once upon a time, I tried to get myself together
Be more like the sky and welcome every kind of weather
Be more eagle-like and find the flight in every feather
Once upon a time, but I'm still trying to get better
Maybe I'm just crazy, I should just be a brick in the wall
Sit and watch the TV, blame everyone else for it all
But then the Martin’s lyrics descend into the vapid Eat-Pray-Love mantra that’s going to completely take over soon:
But I'm trying to trust in the heavens above
And I'm trying to trust in a world full of love
Fire and water and constantly dream
Of the balance of things and the music between
The song “We Pray” is where things really fall apart. I actually think Martin is a lyricist who could do a pretty good job on a song styled as a prayer. But this song is not a prayer to any deity. It’s a prayer to, well, the air?
“Jupiter” is a clear LGBT anthem, their second in as many records. Does this sound like someone really invested in this?
Jupiter longed to be herself or die
"I wanna burst into a butterfly"
"Am I bad? Am I wrong? Am I not okay?
Speaking only words that a girl can't say"
Still she followed the rain to where the rainbow lay
All of the angels singing "Come and say"
"I love who I love (I love who I love)
Oh yeah, I love who I love (I love who I love)
It gets worse. Here’s the ridiculous “iAAM:”
I got this feeling and now nothing is frightening
I got this feeling I can summon up lightning
I got this feeling and just what it is, God only knows
But here it goes
Stood on a sea of pain
Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain
I'll be back on my feet again
'Cause I am a mountain
Musically, all of these lyrics are backed by flat, electronic ambiences that anyone could generate on a decent laptop. There is no hint of musical aspiration on Moon Music. It is a profoundly obligatory album, all in the service of songs that speak into a historic mental health crisis with the most predictable platitudes imaginable.
It’s not just that these songs are boring or cliche. It’s that they are boring and cliche in precisely the same way that nearly every big-box marketing campaign over the last two decades has been boring and cliche. This is what passes for “spirituality” among the elite. This is exactly what people can expect if they go to Barnes and Noble and look at the self-help section. Every idea and note on Moon Music is on regular rotation on the most tired channels of mainstream pop culture, and has been for a long time. The message is simple: Love who you love. Be happy. Love everybody. Don’t think too hard. Avoid people who do. Love who you love love love.
Here’s the point: When a band, an author, or a corporation puts out stuff like this, it feels like a lie. It’s fake. It’s phoned-in. It’s the philosophy of the mansion-ed, the religion of the backstage pass. And stuff this corny and detached from life has a way of making some folks angry.
It makes people angry to be told time and time again that they just need to be open to the universe, when they know they actually need healing in their family. It makes people angry to be told time and time again that they need to love who they love, if their body and their mind are telling them two different things. It makes people angry to be told they are a mountain when they can’t even get out of bed.
Donald Trump represents a lot of things. But one of those things is a frustration with lies told with smiles. Trump cuts a figure in the Western consciousness that is the opposite of Moon Music. Everything he is, from the way he looks to the way he walks to the way he speaks, comes from a different planet than these lyrics. So when Trump says things that sound like they don’t belong in a self-care session, some of the people listening believe him, precisely because it doesn’t sound like that.
Consider these as two rival visions of how to live in the modern world. The first vision, represented by Moon Music, is a world wrapped in therapy-speak and positivity lingo. This vision looks like hot yoga sessions and gender transitions. It sounds like “I am a mountain” and #ShoutYourAbortion. It feels like deliberate childlessness and climate activism. It is a vision of relative wealth, comfort, recreation, and politics-as-church.
The second vision, represented by Trump, is a vision of anger, but also reality. It is a destructive vision in the sense that it doesn’t know how ideological enemies fit in the big picture. But it is a vision that resonates with those who feel failed by the dominant messages they’ve received at school, work, and Instagram. It’s a vision that seems to explain why money and therapy don’t buy happiness, and why the sexual revolution doesn’t satisfy.
As long as the heralds of the first vision are content to produce stuff like Moon Music, there will always be people drawn to the second. Because not even Coldplay have been chained to this vision forever. There was a time when their thinking and feeling went further than this:
In your tears and in your blood
In your fire and in your flood
I hear you laugh, I heard you sing
I wouldn't change a single thingAnd the wheels just keep on turning
The drummers begin to drum
I don't know which way I'm going
I don't know what I've becomeFor you, I'd wait 'til kingdom come
Until my days, my days are done
And say you'll come and set me free
Just say you'll wait, you'll wait for me
I recently noticed two political signs in hanging in my city. The first was a Biden/Harris sign with the tagline “Restore the Soul of America” at the bottom. The second was a Trump sign with the tagline “No More Bull#@%*.” The first had the appearance of heartfelt sincerity, but to me ended up landing as a mostly empty platitude. The second is obviously more crass and disagreeable, but also strikes a very different chord than the first. This tonal difference alone could probably sort most of American voters.
I do wonder how much of this is tied to a cultural infantilism that encourages us to see crudeness as authenticity, not just in Trump but in anybody. It’s like we’ve tied certain virtues to these two big magnets that have an inverse polarity, unable to ever actually touch.
Do you believe Trump and his voters would change their mind and feel less angry and belied to if Coldplay just produced and played good songs like their old “Till Kingdom Come" which you reference at the end? I doubt it. Even Coldplay's old songs strike a very different tone than the one the Trump base speaks. Coldplay and bands and songwriters like them represent a different attitude towards life: more sensitive, fragile (think "Fix You") and personal. Cultural items like these are less triumphant and victorious in nature. Besides, Coldplay, U2, Ed Sheeran and the like are British and not American; which I believe is not a coincidence. British (and generally speaking) European music, cinema and even humour is usually more subdued and nuanced than the “can do” heroes Hollywood produces. I doubt die-hard Trump fans appreciate any of this “softy” British fluff.
I still agree with your piece and think it's once again thought-provoking and well-argued. Yes, there is a lot of phoniness in modern culture and I myself and sick and tired of hearing the superficial and trite therapy-speak-kind-of “spirituality” that we get presented constantly. But what I like to argue is that even without these ills society and I'd even say in a general way human-kind is divided into two kinds of people: people who are drawn to strength and success and others who are drawn to sensitivity and subtlety. While society has moved more and more to the latter, Trump clearly comes from and caters to the former group.
Considering all this, churches should try to present and follow the whole Jesus - his tough and tender sides. The sides that appeal to Mark Driscoll and the ones that appeal to Christian momfluencers on Substack.