Coldgay

I probably would have given this an essay an A because I agree with it so much. Of course, without my biased opinion, I believe the content in backing up claims would receive a grade of somewhere between B and a C. The paper had the feel like Jon Parales had a grudge against Mr. Martin. While Pareles makes his claim against Cold Play, he only uses a single album as his defense. Aside from Mr. Martin’s voice and lyrics, he only seems to criticize very minor aspects of the album which he views as flaws. He even defends the instrumental ability of the band by saying that they have “mastered all the mechanics of pop songwriting.” The structure of his writing also makes his arguments less convincing, as he devotes one paragraph to ranting on how awful Mr. Martin’s lyrics are or voice is, while he turns around to praises their instrumental genius or compares them to much greater bands the next. He also devotes three paragraphs to show how popular they have grown (which doesn’t give any real argument as to why Coldplay shouldn’t be considered a good band), in what seems like a cheap-shot attempt to gain sympathy from the loner/anti-bandwagon crowd. Aside from lyric quotes, their was no real evidence to support any of his claims. Pareles made to big of a claim that coldplay is “the most insufferable band of the decade,” and failed to back any of it up. His only real argument was that Mr. Martin can’t sing well, and Mr. Martin has bad lyrics, which took him an entire paper to rant about instead of making a convincing argument in a couple of well supported paragraphs. This is why I would give Parales a B to a C.