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The Happy Couple

by DICK CHENEY

Imagine some guy (Chris Martin) is placing his rigid penis inside of you, and then the next day he says, "I've got to spend the day with Gwyneth." You respond how any sane person would; you say, "But she will definitely not be having sex with you, Chris." "Sex isn't everything," he responds, and goes off to consciously uncouple.

It is hard to be Jennifer Lawrence. How do you think that she felt when she was dumped by Chris Martin for a darker-haired version of his ex-wife? I can answer that for you: She felt absolutely terrible. I mean, look at this woman:

Chris' new girlfriend, British actress Annabelle Wallis, is a lot more accomodating than Jennifer Lawrence. Ms. Lawrence has been let down by men before. It's not exactly a phenomenon to which she is unaccustomed. She put out a casting call for boyfriends quite recently, and not a single member of One Direction responded. She intimidates men, probably, but she did something worse than intimidate Chris Martin: she bored him.

Coldplay release their seventh album, A Head Full of Dreams, this week. The title comes from the fact that Chris Martin woke up one day and was like, "You know how when we sleep at night, our head is literally full of our dreams?!?!" And the band members were like, "Yes, Chris, we will say absolutely anything to stop you from being depressed about women."

A Head Full of Dreams contains not one single song about Jennifer Lawrence. It pretends that she does not even exist, that she never existed, that she was just a rebound-esque distraction for Chris as he found a more interesting woman with a lot more life experience than Jennifer Lawrence. I mean, when Lawrence reaches back into her life history, what does she really have to tell Chris that is worth repeating in song lyrics? "Let me reminisce about that time I got my period on the set of a multimillionaire movie I wasn't paid enough for." No, he's not interested in that. He misses Gwyneth, and when she used to tell him about the evils of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere.

"Been around the world looking for someone like you," Chris openly admits on A Head Full of Dreams, essentially, someone like Gwyneth. This is a frightening thought, but to Annabelle Wallis' credit, she seems to have embraced being the faux-coupler. She even sings on the album's best track, "Up & Up". "Army of One" has Chris explaining that he is "going to fight for you," a statement especially galling to Jennifer Lawrence, because he took her about as seriously as a child takes his own mortality.

Chris Martin is a child, but so is his new girlfriend, who grew up in Portugal. "If you get the chance to live abroad, lessons in life it gives you are like no other," she explained in one interview. Then she allowed a photographer to take pictures of her dressed like this:

Fortunately in ensuing months Annabelle has gone brunette, because it is important to Chris that she does not too closely resemble a younger version of his children's mother. On A Head Full of Dreams, Annabelle's singing is basically identical to Gwyneth's in that their voices are both dissembled into the background, superceded by Chris' vocals. The only woman you really hear during the entirety of A Head Full of Dreams is, weirdly, Beyonce. She guests on "Hymn for A Weekend," which sounds like basically every song on the album.

Coldplay worked with various hitmakers instead of writing their own album or letting Brian Eno arrange it. The result is something more in the vein of popular music today than their usual sound that resembles a U2 cover band, so I guess they were successful in what they were going for. The comments from Martin to USA Today recently were downright scary: "If I may speak for the band, sometimes you need a break from the singer," he told them. Yikes.

The only problem with this slight alteration in sound is that Coldplay was actually better at sounding like U2 than the original band, and their music occupied an important niche that appealed to sensitive white men who felt overwhelmed by strong women but unable to articulate exactly why. Instead, the producers of A Head Full of Dreams did a fine job of making the album sound like everything else that is on the radio, just with more ridiculous lyrics. "I want to hold you and sway," Martin explains like some fucking idiot. A Head Full of Dreams is so gleefully enthusiastic the album sounds like inspirational music for atheists. "I'm feeling drunk and high," Chris whines, even though he is neither. He is just thankful to be dating a woman who doesn't demand anything from him.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"Up & Up" - Coldplay (mp3)