HARD OF HEARING….Laura Turner comments on the new Coldplay album:
Yes, I know listening to Coldplay is lame. I don’t care. I love this sort of empty-calories power pop. Or I would if not for the heinous quality of Chris Martin’s lyrics, which on this effort seem to be some sort of passive-aggressive ode to failing grade-8 geometry. I try to ignore them and indulge in the falsetto and driving crunchy guitar and good production and endless hooks. But the procession of physics-for-poets lines like “You?re a part of the human race / All the stars in outer space / You?re a part of a system? just really subtracts from the Coldplay listening experience.
Luckily for me, I don’t usually have this problem because, thanks to poor hearing, I can almost never make out the lyrics of pop songs in the first place.
As it happens, my hearing is below average in two ways. First, in the usual volume-oriented way, which is why I like the TV volume turned up higher than most people. This doesn’t explain the pop lyrics thing, though, since I can always turn up the volume on the radio too.
But there’s a second way my hearing is poor: I have a harder time than most people discerning sounds when there’s any ambient noise around. Turn on a water faucet in the next room and I can’t make out what people are saying on TV. Put a bunch of people in a room talking at normal volume and I can’t make out what the person next to me is saying. And song lyrics? Forget it.
I suppose there must be a name for this condition, right? Does anyone know what it is?
