It all started with a mildly irritating but altogether innocuous song about things being yellow. The song, though, was all over the radio, causing irrevocable damage to the world. What followed was a deluge of songs built entirely around Chris Martin mumbling largely unintelligible lyrics about clocks and other common place items in his nasal, three-note range. This garbage continued to spill forth for roughly a decade, providing Chris Martin with enough money to seemingly buy Gwyneth Paltrow’s assent to both marry him and to name their daughter “Apple.” For a few years, Coldplay was quiet and I hoped this apocalyptic storm of crap had finally passed for good.
Then something strange happened. In 2008, Coldplay released a song that I couldn’t get enough of. It was upbeat and catchy, but not too poppy. It had a string section playing an arrangement of chords that sent shivers down my spine. The song was called “Viva La Vida” and, as it turns out, was an almost note-for-note copy of a song written four years prior by exalted guitar god Joe Satriani called “If I Could Fly.” Satriani sued for copyright infringement and Coldplay settled for an undisclosed sum. Yet, somehow, Coldplay still won a Grammy for this song. That was the moment Coldplay went from mildly irritating but altogether innocuous to truly evil.-KS

Talladega Nights

I will never understand why this is seemingly one of the most popular Will Ferrel movies, second only to Anchor Man in the amount of people who quote it. Anchor Man I get, that movie is filled with comedy golden nuggets, even if the general masses have referenced it ad nauseam. But Talledga Nights is where Ferrel finally hammered home that his overly cocky sports character was not that funny. That man has range, check out Stranger than Fiction or Everything Must Go if you haven’t seen them. For some reason there was a period of a couple of years where he lazily gave us variations on the same douche bag involved in different sporting activities. It made me wary of Ferrel in general until he proved he still knew how to do more. I just don’t get why Talladega Nights is put on a pedestal and Blades of Glory isn’t. I’m not saying Blades of Glory is a great movie, it’s pretty far from it; but there are jokes throughout that actually work- not just redneck stereotypes and a dude praying to baby Jesus. Everyone involved in TN has stellar work under their belt, it just all smashed together into unfunny boring garbage for 118 minutes. I just think if something is going to be quoted incessantly, it should lean towards being original or funny, that’s just me.  -MG