We can’t love everything. And neither should you. —Ed.
Imagine Dragons. Now imagine something worse—something far, far worse.
Imagine a band that has sold 3 million copies of a song that is pure, uncut Coldplay ripoff (“Demons”), and twice that volume of a song about how they’re radioactive (“Radioactive”), which in my humble opinion they are. I can listen to “Demons” because I happen to like Coldplay, have ever since I saw the video for “The Scientist” and was immediately smitten by the way Chris Martin makes his eyes flash (however does he do that?) at the very beginning.
But if I could live with an Imagine Dragons that are content to ape Coldplay, in the same way that Coldplay ape Radiohead, on “Radioactive” Imagine Dragons don’t even pretend to be a poor man’s Coldplay, and the results are faceless, and well, desultory. Ne’er in all me puff did I expect to hear a “Radioactive” I liked even less than The Firm’s 1985 “Radioactive.” But listening to the Brit geezers’ version again, I’m forced to conclude it puts the enormously popular Las Vegas, Nevada quartet’s “Radioactive” to shame.
The opening of Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” is pretty enough, but when he doesn’t sound like Chris Martin, and he doesn’t here, front man Dan Reynolds sounds like anybody or everybody, and the song clumps along like a man with a wooden leg. It also comes complete with those big clichéd whiplash drumbeats and enough “Ohohohohohohs” to make you think you’re listening to “The Song of the Volga Boatmen.” And “I raise my flag and don my clothes/It’s a revolution I suppose” makes me wonder why Reynolds doesn’t don his clothes before raising his flag, unless the flag he’s talking about is pure sexual metaphor, which I dearly hope it isn’t.
I can see how this lackluster clunker won a Teen Choice Award (teens are stupid and even like Paramore, to say nothing of Fall Out Boy), but how it garnered a Grammy is beyond me. If this is truly the Apocalypse “Radioactive” says it is, we really are going out not with a bang, but with an “Ohohohohoh.”
