Can Coldplay, the most successful band of the 21st century, play their greatest supporting act yet and simultaneously help bring peace to the Middle East?
Music is the Weapon of the Future
“Music is the weapon, music is the weapon of the future” chants a sampled Fela Kuti on Coldplay’s ‘Arabesque’, a song off their 2019 album, Everyday Life. Fela Kuti was the pioneer of Afrobeat, a music genre combining traditional Yoruba percussion (music from Benin, Nigeria, and Togo) with American funk and jazz.
In the same way, as Coldplay’s succes has allowed them the luxury to team up with South-Korean boyband the Bangtan Boys (BTS) to make genre-bending music that cross-pollinates cultures, playlists, and new commercial markets, Fela Kuti was doing this the hard way in the summer of ’69 in the United States as a Nigerian without a work permit.
The man knew a thing or two about struggle. His mother was a women’s rights activist and throughout his career he remained vocal about his Pan-Africanist beliefs, championing solidarity between all indigenous and diaspora ethnic groups of African descent.
(Lead singer of Coldplay) Chris Martin’s inclusion of Fela Kuti’s sample is nothing short of a Trojan horse: a seemingly benign pop song impregnated with a belly of deeper meaning, subtly designed to stop and make you think.
Fela Kuti’s son, Femi, is playing the horns in the background, and his son, Made, can be heard playing the saxophone. That’s three generations of Nigerians with political activism in their genes, playing on one song trying to sew worldwide peace in the wake of increased Islamophobia.
Throw in Le Trio Joubran playing the oud, Belgian musician Stromae (of Alors on Danse fame) singing ‘You could be me, I could be you’ in French while Chris Martin hoarsely croons back at him ‘And we share the same blood’ and a universal message of peace and love you have not heard since Michael Jackson got everyone together in a room to sing ‘We are the World’ comes into being.
Can Music Deliver World Peace?
So can Coldplay do what Michael Jackson never got the chance to do and heal the world? They’ve always been brazen in their ambitions for peace, if not as ‘Trojan-like ’ and tactful as they perhaps are now. In 2010 they posted a link to OneWorld’s single ‘Freedom For Palestine’ to their Facebook page and received so many complaints that Facebook’s bots shut the page down.
In 2017 Chris Martin visited Palestine and had to denounce rumors that they were planning to perform there. “We are in Israel and Palestine to listen and learn and that’s all”, he said on Twitter. Here they met with Adnan Joubran who can be heard along with his two other brothers on Arabesque, playing the oud. The oud, a fretless, stringed instrument similar to modern lutes but with roots dating back to ancient Mesopotamia, is synonymous with classic Palestinian music.
The oud has no frets denoting musical keys, so there are all the spaces between the notes and scales, and you have those all at your fingertips. This scale, commonly known as the double harmonic scale, may often sound unfamiliar to Western listeners. Without the musical map of Western music to restrict you, there is no reference point – hence the unique sound of Middle Eastern music.
This is the sound that Coldplay is welcoming into western music playlists. This is their Trojan horse. To hammer home the metaphor: music is a weapon. In this case, it’s the sound of freedom; an instrument without set boundaries, without no restrictions.
This is surely where world peace starts: with us all singing from the same songbook.
Slowly at first, then suddenly
There is another song بنی آد (‘Children of Adam’) on the album Everyday Life that samples the famous Persian poet Saadi and translates loosely as:
Human beings are inherent parts of one body,
and are from the same valuable essence in their creation.
When the conditions of the time hurts one of these parts,
other parts will be disturbed.
If you are indifferent about the misery of others,
it may not be appropriate to call yourself a human being.
So it turns out that empathy for one’s fellow man in the Middle East has been around (in Persian poetry at least) since the thirteenth century when Saadi penned these ideals.
And yet here we are, 20 grueling years into the 21st century. There is no peace in the Middle East. The struggle for the rights of Palestinians is as pronounced as ever. But when Coldplay – one of the world’s most successful bands of all time – are looking to “learn and listen”, it is here that they come to.
They then infuse their music with a Middle Eastern consciousness that is affable in its affectations: you want to love the new sounds you hear. And so you want to love the place where it comes from, its people and so on. Until, one day, there will be only love.
Peace in the Middle East will come slowly at first, then suddenly. And when it does, you can bet that Coldplay will feature on the soundtrack.
