In Which We Find Out Why He Dumped Jennifer Lawrence

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)

In Which We Get Pretty Used To Being With Gwyneth

The Clocks Represented Soy Gelato

by ALEX CARNEVALE

There is a point near the end of the new Coldplay album Ghost Stories where Chris Martin compares his relationship to the mother of his children with the flight of a flock of birds. Like the coordinated journey of such creatures, Gwyneth must fly away in something like a migratory pattern. The implication is that the bearded Englishman hopes that his goop will return.

So fly on
Ride through
Maybe one day I'll fly next to you

What exactly was the problem that led to the conscious uncoupling? Ghost Stories cites several complaints that Martin had with his soon-to-be ex-wife:

- She did not enjoy watching television with him, i.e.  "Late night watching TV/Used to be you here beside me/Is there someone there to reach me?/Or someone there to find me?"

- Sometimes he waited for her call, but she never called, so it was impossible to masturbate without hearing the sound of her voice.

- Despite his elaborate plan to convince Gwyneth that British come had certain restorative autoimmune properties not present in the American editions, she preferred smoked fennel and an orange scented millet.

- She was more interested in other guys at times, especially ones whose albums were not as whiny/complainy, or included musicians playing instruments.

It is difficult to see what Gwyneth saw in this creature from the beginning. On the surface Martin appeared to be the equivalent of a broken jack-in-the-box: sometimes he would write a semi-decent song, the rest of the time he would just pout about wristwatches and fixing ww (white women). Martin is now completely done with ww, having selected a girlfriend ten years his wife's junior, half-Asian model Alexa Chung.

"I wish you could have let me know," Martin "sings" on the Timbaland produced "True Love." Could he not just read her blog?

Other lyrics are even more depraved and pathetic. In "Another's Arms," when he is not kvetching about not having Gwyneth there when he is watching telly, he sings, "Got to put yourself into me," which has to raise some eyebrows. I guess he means a finger or a strap-on? As usual, Martin's vocals are half spoken and half sung except when he reaches into a falsetto for a couplet about how Gwyneth refuses to do some sexual act he grew accustomed to during the recording of Parachutes.

I guess he hopes to make Gwyneth jealous by dating this woman, although he probably could have accomplished much the same effect by cozying up to a human-sized stick of celery and licking it lasciviously at intervals.

It is a virtual certainty, based on some of the subtle references in Ghost Stories, that Gwyneth has what can be charitably described as a unique set of sexual needs. Blowjobs are of course out of the question; "You want to see the mother of your children with a dick in her mouth?" she reportedly once screamed at L.A. hotspot Navarro. Handjobs were more of a grey area, since they usually do leave the other hand free for web browsing.

As subtly described in Ghost Stories' finest track, "Ink", Martin felt he got a tattoo that said "together through life," but instead Gwyneth's changing needs interfered with their coupling. For some reason, Martin explained in a recent radio interview, she demanded that every single door in their home become a 'sliding door.'

When she would emerge through each transparent entryway, she would get this super-disappointed look on her face implying that she was upset by the reality of her life: two adorable children and a husband who cannot sing and constantly demands oral.

The now fractured family spent a sedate Mother's Day at the Paltrow family compound. Even after writing an entire album about how sad he is that Gwyneth prefers to make guys dress up like Richie Tenenbaum and invite her into their fort for some salty seitan snacks and a bottle of gluten-free Riesling, he still has to see this woman on a frequent basis. At times he puts the new album on in the car for his whole family to listen, turning his day-to-day life into a neverending awkward conversation about how "Daddy and Mommy still love you very much."

"Daddy?" their son Lozenge would ask in an extremely grating voice, "Was it really necessary to tell Mommy that her chemistry with Robert Downey Jr. reminds you of the chemistry between Angelina Jolie and the woman who does her makeup?"

Chris Martin answered his child the only way he could, "Iron Man 2 sucked hard," he told the boy. "But your mom never sucked at all."

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"True Love" - Coldplay (mp3)

"O" - Coldplay (mp3)