What artist makes you feel like you’re eating plain oatmeal?

ian_dissonance said:
Yeah, Kid Rock really killed those tracks that they pre-recorded for the 200 people paid to be there. Or wait, you mean the actual Super Bowl halftime that’s been 100% canned for the last 30 years?
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Billy Bob Thornton Goliath GIF by Amazon Prime Video
 
ian_dissonance said:
It’s definitely not the “nudging around samples and sends” in Ableton selling the records, lol. Not my jam, but dude is a big star. Audio production doesn’t get that for you.
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OK, that's a fair observation. Perhaps it's his talent and/or charisma as a performer. But a big star needs a big audience, so there's something of a chicken and egg scenario here. All I mean to say is, when I'm bombarded with news about the highest-selling/ award-winning Spanish-language album in the history of the Grammy's etc etc etc, my response is to go and listen to that album. And when I did, I wasn't blown away by the song writing or vocal performances; mostly I heard a lot of very slick production. (Massive disclaimer: I only persisted through the first half of maybe three songs.)

I wouldn't underestimate the power of audio production, particularly on songs that fill nightclubs, etc. It's had a major impact on the careers of artists like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, etc.

ian_dissonance said:
At least it wasn’t like Kid Rock or Ted Nugent or some other fuckin’ goofball.
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Agreed, but lets leave it that - again per forum rules.
 
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Chocol8 said:
If you leave it on the counter overnight...Coldplay
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I have asked Grok the literal question from the OP. Grok agrees with us.

"For me personally? I'd throw Coldplay (post-Viva La Vida era especially) into that category—their later stuff can feel like perfectly competent, emotionally lukewarm wallpaper music that nourishes zero soul. It's the aural version of eating plain oatmeal while staring at a beige wall"

When requested to elaborate:


Coldplay: the musical equivalent of a beige IKEA rug in a waiting room—soft, inoffensive, and utterly forgettable once you leave.

They started with a whisper of promise (Parachutes had that fragile, rainy-day charm), but then they discovered the secret to eternal success: strip out every last drop of risk, crank the uplift to cult-leader levels, and serve it in stadium-sized portions until the world chokes on yellow stars and light switches.

Their lyrics? A Hallmark card generator on life support—endless platitudes about fixing hearts, shining lights, and higher powers that sound profound if you've never read a poem or felt a real emotion. It's saccharine positivity so relentless it could induce altitude sickness, as one critic perfectly put it. Clichés stacked like unpaid parking tickets: "lights will guide you home," "nobody said it was easy," rinse, repeat until your soul files for bankruptcy.

Musically, science has confirmed what your ears already knew: they've gotten objectively blander over 28 years. Less harmonic daring, more formulaic major-key resolutions designed for arena sing-alongs and car commercials. They chase every trend—EDM drops, BTS collabs, emoji titles—like a desperate dad trying to stay relevant at the school disco. Sellout? More like voluntary corporate merger.

Chris Martin himself is the walking embodiment: that falsetto whine, the Gwyneth-era pretension, the perpetual "I'm just a sensitive guy" vibe that lands somewhere between insufferable and aggressively wholesome. The man's charisma is so diluted it's basically tap water with a lemon slice for flair.

Overexposure sealed the deal. They're inescapable—Super Bowl slots, billion-stream anthems, wristbands that sync to your feelings (because nothing says authenticity like LED coercion). Success this massive turns mild meh into seething contempt. Like Nickelback or U2 before them, they're the safe, smug soundtrack for people who think "vibes" are a personality.

In short: Coldplay is audio oatmeal that's been left out overnight—nourishing on a technical level, but zero flavor, zero edge, zero reason to ever crave seconds. It's music engineered to soundtrack your midlife crisis without ever making you question why you're having one.

If blandness were a crime, they'd be serving life in beige.
 
Piing said:
I have asked Grok the literal question from the OP. Grok agrees with us.

"For me personally? I'd throw Coldplay (post-Viva La Vida era especially) into that category—their later stuff can feel like perfectly competent, emotionally lukewarm wallpaper music that nourishes zero soul. It's the aural version of eating plain oatmeal while staring at a beige wall"

When requested to elaborate:


Coldplay: the musical equivalent of a beige IKEA rug in a waiting room—soft, inoffensive, and utterly forgettable once you leave.

They started with a whisper of promise (Parachutes had that fragile, rainy-day charm), but then they discovered the secret to eternal success: strip out every last drop of risk, crank the uplift to cult-leader levels, and serve it in stadium-sized portions until the world chokes on yellow stars and light switches.

Their lyrics? A Hallmark card generator on life support—endless platitudes about fixing hearts, shining lights, and higher powers that sound profound if you've never read a poem or felt a real emotion. It's saccharine positivity so relentless it could induce altitude sickness, as one critic perfectly put it. Clichés stacked like unpaid parking tickets: "lights will guide you home," "nobody said it was easy," rinse, repeat until your soul files for bankruptcy.

Musically, science has confirmed what your ears already knew: they've gotten objectively blander over 28 years. Less harmonic daring, more formulaic major-key resolutions designed for arena sing-alongs and car commercials. They chase every trend—EDM drops, BTS collabs, emoji titles—like a desperate dad trying to stay relevant at the school disco. Sellout? More like voluntary corporate merger.

Chris Martin himself is the walking embodiment: that falsetto whine, the Gwyneth-era pretension, the perpetual "I'm just a sensitive guy" vibe that lands somewhere between insufferable and aggressively wholesome. The man's charisma is so diluted it's basically tap water with a lemon slice for flair.

Overexposure sealed the deal. They're inescapable—Super Bowl slots, billion-stream anthems, wristbands that sync to your feelings (because nothing says authenticity like LED coercion). Success this massive turns mild meh into seething contempt. Like Nickelback or U2 before them, they're the safe, smug soundtrack for people who think "vibes" are a personality.

In short: Coldplay is audio oatmeal that's been left out overnight—nourishing on a technical level, but zero flavor, zero edge, zero reason to ever crave seconds. It's music engineered to soundtrack your midlife crisis without ever making you question why you're having one.

If blandness were a crime, they'd be serving life in beige.
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Mom: "We've got less offensive U2 at home!"
 
When asking to provide scientific rationale about why Coldplay makes you feel like you’re eating plain oatmeal:


The smoking gun comes from a 2025 study in Royal Society Open Science by Professor Nick Collins (Durham University), who used computational musicology to crunch audio features across decades of recordings from R.E.M., Radiohead, and Coldplay (plus controls like Patsy Cline and Buddy Holly). He measured variation in harmony, timbre, rhythm, and overall diversity over time.

  • Harmonic daring (a metric for how adventurous/complex/unpredictable the chord choices and progressions are) shows a clear downward trend for Coldplay as they moved deeper into pop-mainstream territory. Early stuff had some modest exploration; later albums flatten out, reusing safer, more predictable harmonic palettes. New songs increasingly sound like echoes of old ones—less novelty, less surprise, more formula. Radiohead, by contrast, held or even increased harmonic variety. R.E.M. stayed steady (not adventurous, but consistent). Coldplay? Objectively blander over 28 years.
  • Timbral-rhythmic diversity gets some exploration in later work (they chase new sounds like EDM drops or electronic layers), but it doesn't compensate for the harmonic retreat. The overall output clusters tighter than peers—less spread in the "musical space" they occupy, meaning lower entropy/variability across their catalog. In plain terms: their sonic fingerprint shrinks, gets more homogenized.
Other music-theory dissections back this up indirectly:
  • Analyses of melodic-harmonic "disconnect" (e.g., in songs from Parachutes to X&Y) show early Coldplay leaned on tonal ambiguity—melodies pulling one way, chords another, creating floating, unresolved tension. It's a clever trick... until it isn't. Later work dials that back toward straightforward major-key resolutions and arena-friendly loops (think plateau loops in collabs like "Something Just Like This"—hovering around IV-V-vi without strong tonic grounding, but without the daring edge that made early ambiguity interesting).
  • Broader pop-music metrics (e.g., studies on chord-progression novelty, repetition, and entropy in large corpora) often place mainstream acts like post-2000s Coldplay in low-variance zones: heavy repetition of simple progressions, reduced rhythmic complexity in service of anthemic builds, and predictable emotional arcs engineered for mass uplift rather than surprise or depth.
Scientifically speaking, Coldplay didn't just "get boring"—they engineered a trajectory toward maximal inoffensiveness and minimal harmonic risk, quantifiable in declining "daring" scores and tighter feature clustering. It's like evolution in reverse: adapting perfectly to stadiums and playlists by shedding anything that might challenge the ear. Nourishing? Sure, on a basic nutritional level. Exciting? The data says no.
 
Dom Mcsweeney said:
Re: bad bunny - this was totally awesome in my opinion.


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What part? IMHO, I think his vocals are pretty dang bad. Not a great voice and a below average singer/rapper. I am extremely confident that I could find 100 Spanish speaking young men who have better voices and who can sing better without traveling more than 10-15 miles from my home.

I honestly don't see an ounce of musical talent in the guy, it seems to be 100% marketing, production, and the people supporting him. Maybe I am old and out of touch, but I can see talent in plenty of other young artists so what makes him different?
 
OTOH, I am pretty impressed with Grok's snark filled take on Cold Play. It comes across as highly informed, but not technical milk toast. The observations are both on the nose and delivered with a subtle nastiness that you wouldn't necessarily expect from an algorithm. Well done Grok team.
 
Chocol8 said:
What part? IMHO, I think his vocals are pretty dang bad. Not a great voice and a below average singer/rapper. I am extremely confident that I could find 100 Spanish speaking young men who have better voices and who can sing better without traveling more than 10-15 miles from my home.

I honestly don't see an ounce of musical talent in the guy, it seems to be 100% marketing, production, and the people supporting him. Maybe I am old and out of touch, but I can see talent in plenty of other young artists so what makes him different?
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I have a completely different perspective it would seem, and that's ok!
 
Chocol8 said:
I am seriously interested in what you think he is good at. The band is good etc. but what am I missing about him?
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I've never been a big fan of latin music, so I would defer on most points relating to Bad Bunny. But the first observation I'd make is that this Tiny Desk performance is, in many ways, 180 degrees removed from the recorded material that's recently winning all the awards.
 
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Chocol8 said:
I am seriously interested in what you think he is good at. The band is good etc. but what am I missing about him?
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He is an amazing person and delivers an important message about his culture.
He is meaningful, relevant, compassionate, punk, beautiful...

I think there are many reasons to support artists like him, rather than not.
 
I’m just joining this thread but I’m going to say anything from that 2010s era 1800s cosplay stomp-clap ‘indie folk’ bullshit that was so prevalent on the indie rock radio stations at the time. You know beards and handlebar mustaches and pork pie hats and skin tight jeans, acoustic guitars and banjos and mandolins and the whole band joining in for the chorus.
 
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