Viva la Vida

I love and adore Coldplay.

That’s right; I’m not ashamed to admit it. Chris Martin’s voice makes me melt into buttery little puddles.

The first time I heard that “Viva la Vida” song on an Apple iTunes commercial, I immediately knew it was Coldplay. I pounced on my husband and grabbed the remote from his hand, furiously smashing the volume + button. My husband looked at me bewildered. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

“It’s Coldplay,”I breathed.

He rolled his eyes, got up, went to my Mac, and opened my iTunes. He snorted. “Heh, is that song called Viva la Vida? it’s the number one most downloaded song on iTunes. I’ll download it for you.”

(He’s a sweetheart, but that’s not the point of this post.)

I ran into my office and searched for the lyrics to the song so I could sing along with Chris Martin and pretend we were on stage together. I stumbled upon a lyrics web forum where people could post reactions, comments, corrections to the lyrics.

If you haven’t heard the song, it’s basically a song told from the point of view of an ex-King/General/Ruler/Emperor about life as the ruler of the world, and then the fallout.

At least, that’s what I get out of the song. These people on the forum had other, very specific, and sometimes outrageous ideas.

Ideas about what the song really means range from President Bush’s war in Iraq to the French Revolution to Jesus to Capitalism. Several of the arguments about what the song means are well articulated, well supported, creative, and interesting. But none of that makes them right.

Songs are wildly subjective. But not just songs—symbolism and imagery of all sorts are deeply subjective. Sure, there are cultural norms that many of us have inherited and will refer to, but sometimes those norms conflict, and it becomes difficult to ferret out the “right answer”, assuming there is one.

My mother tells a story about an English class she took in college. They were asked to read a short story about a young woman who has an abortion. At the end of the story, the young woman is driving her car and comes upon a storefront sign whose marquee is a giant capital T. The sign makes her cry.

The question put to the students is, “Why does the woman cry?”

My mother is a deeply religious woman, so she responded that the woman cried because the T reminded her of Jesus’s cross, and the burdens He bears for all of humankind, even this woman who had sinned against Her savior and herself, yadda yadda.

The teacher, however, indicated (in red ink, no less) that my mother was completely wrong. The woman cried because the T reminded her of the uterus and fallopian tubes.

Now, I haven’t read the story. Maybe something in the story that I am unaware of indicated the association of T’s with woman parts and not Jesus, but probably not. In the context that I have, either answer seems perfectly plausible. Both of these symbols fit this scenario. The wilderness of human imagination and association is crazy territory, and who am I—or anyone—to say what is “right” and what is “wrong”? That’s part of the beauty of symbolic language and abstract thought—the territory is diffuse and watercolor. If you’re looking for absolutes, talk to the Mathematicians. And even still, be careful.

We could ask Chris Martin et al. what the song means, but even then, even though they are the creators, they’d only be giving what they intended the song to mean—what it means to them. Because once a song enters my brain and becomes part of my inner landscape, it becomes entangled with my beliefs and impressions and no longer belongs to Coldplay. It becomes part of me and I become part of it, and what it means to me is just as valid as what it means to its creators.

And, just for the record, whoever is responsible at Apple not only for choosing which songs to use in their commercials but for editing them into their thirty seconds bytes is brilliant. If you’re reading this and single, drop me a line, ok? Just don’t tell my husband.