Ethical birth-control OR The Coldplay Experience?

He was referring to the fact that ethical birth-control pills, the only legal form of birth control, made people numb from the waist down.

Most men said their bottom halves felt like cold iron or balsawood. Most women said their bottom halves felt like wet cotton or stale ginger ale. The pills were so effective that you could blindfold a man who had taken one, tell him to recite the Gettysburg Address, kick him in the balls while he was doing it, and he wouldn’t miss a syllable.

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The pills were ethical because they didn’t interfere with a person’s ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral. All the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of sex.

Thus did science and morals go hand in hand.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. “Welcome to the Monkey House”. As collected in: Welcome to the Monkey House

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It’s not just that Coldplay is so devoid of libidinous celebration so as to surely have been excoriated by a time-travelling Nietzsche, it’s that everything is sublimated into a world of eunuchs and angels, puppy dogs and trips on the good ship “Lollipop”.

What about passion? What about joy? What about dancing about naked around a big bonfire in the middle of a clearing? What about sweat, and sex, and that big middle finger that humans point at the looming spectre of Death saying: “We make that upon which you feed, you may take us in the end but without us you are not?”

What about that great scene from Gladiator where Juba says: “We’ll meet again, but not today.” What about loving and living in this one particular magical moment?

Music, my good people, should be about passion, about exuberance. It’s about glasses of wine, romance, and that simple undeniable knowledege that your blood is feeding a violent organ that says “Live, Live, Live!”

Coldplay is about watching 60 minutes with a can of Diet Rite and wondering if you need a Zanax or a sleeping aid.