Chris Martin opines that Coldplay deserves some hate for being English

Nickelback, Ed Sheeran, Dave Matthews Band—there are some musicians that are really easy to hate on, whether it’s about their actual music, their ubiquity, or their image. You could argue that Coldplay is part of this less-than-illustrious group, and lead singer Chris Martin would agree with you if you did. In fact, he thinks they kinda deserve it—for being English. 

“It would be terrible if we lived in a society where everyone had to [like the same thing]. We’re a very, very easy, safe target. We’re not going to bite back,” Martin says in a new cover interview for Rolling Stone. “We are four white, middle-class men from England. We deserve to take some shit for what our people have done. There’s a reason we get to play all around the world, and part of it is not necessarily very healthy.” 

If part of it is not very healthy, Martin lists other reasons for their global success, albeit a bit self-deprecatingly. “I sometimes feel that we are most powerful in countries where they don’t really speak English,” the singer explains. “I’m not the best lyricist in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but I think if you don’t speak English, there’s a feeling that you feel.” This, of course, is a cornerstone of pop music. Going back at least as far as ABBA, a lot of big hits (at least in the United States) have come from Swedish or otherwise European songwriters often more concerned with fitting syllables to rhythms and melodies than conveying some deep meaning in English. (Perhaps the best, recent example of this is the absolute word soup of Ariana Grande’s “Break Free,” written largely by Max Martin and produced by Zedd.) Apparently, at least according to Martin, the reverse is also true, and it has paid off pretty damn well for this band—even if they are, as he says, an easy, safe target.