A space oddity from those Coldplayers

If there was ever out-of-the-world marketing, it’s this. British sigh’n’moan band Coldplay launched its latest single, ‘Higher Power,’ by transmitting it to space — not Myspace but outer space. So, space being utterly silent, who’s going to do the noble task of listening to the track? Auditory-enabled beings in another planet tired of constantly playing the same old golden record, ‘The Sounds of Earth,’ the probe Voyager had carried with it when launched in 1977 — which includes Kesar Bai Kerkar’s 3 minutes 30 seconds track of the bhajan ‘Jaat kahan ho, gori?’ and 7 minutes 20 seconds first movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony? Not quite. The first listener of Coldplay’s new song was the extra-terrestrial astronaut Thomas Pesquet, currently in the International Space Station.

Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, ever the overstater, ‘explained’ to Pesquet, ‘The song is trying to find the astronaut in all of us, the person that can do amazing things.’ What does that even mean — beyond selling potential listeners a song by first selling it (for free) to an astronaut? Remember, Martin played Holi in Delhi in 2015 — images of which were incorporated into a music video for a track in Coldplay’s next album. Also, does being the first man to listen to punchy, ‘spaced-out’ synths really amount to a giant dubstep for mankind?