India has wandering ascetics clad in saffron robes; mad streets full of motorbikes and auto-rickshaws; insane city skylines broken up by temple towers painted so colourfully, covered so wildly with sculptures that they look like opium dreams or a perfect Fauvist painting. It also has Domino’s, multiplexes and huge, soulless shopping centres. Coldplay’s new video for their collaboration with Beyoncé, ‘Hymn for the Weekend’, creates a hippy-era psychedelic vision from one very particular side to the inï¬nite complex cultures of the subcontinent, an exoticising, orientalising, othering piece of rather seductive beauty.
The song itself is standard Coldplay stuff : Chris Martin’s trademark falsetto soars over melodic, heart-thudding synths, and danceable bass and drum lines pull you effortlessly through to the end. It’s Queen B, of course, who makes this song worth a listen: her vocals float in and out with the ethereality of a Symbolist poem or of incense drifting above the dawn rites of a riverside shrine.
There are a few wince-provoking moments, of course. Yoncé’s generically ‘Indian’, exotically ‘Bollywood’ hand dancing is just a bit embarrassing, and I’m still not sure how I feel about the religious festival of Holi being ornamentalised for a song, especially one with the refrain “I’m feeling drunk and high / So high, so high.” Let’s not forget, though, that it is a cultural and religious tradition to lace your Holi lassi with massive amounts of bhang (a potent preparation of cannabis leaves).
Questions of culture and religion aside, though, it doesn’t sit terribly well to have that refrain repeated over and again over visuals of children messing around or jumping into sacred bathing tanks. At best, this is just weird. At worst, it reinforces the aestheticising, dehumanising portrayal of these kids as no more than a pretty background to the Western singer. Needless to say, there are moments in this video that are worryingly reductive, borderline colonialist and a touch reminiscent of poverty porn. It is also worth noting the total absence of non-Hindu elements in this video’s image of India, something that’s a little uncomfortable given the context of the rise of Islamophobic Hindu nationalism.
This isn’t quite the trainwreck of exoticism – thank God – that accompanied ‘Princess of China’ or Major Lazer’s ‘Lean On’. In the video Chris Martin seems more like a wide-eyed, vaguely clueless tourist than anything else, and the subcontinent’s cultural richness somehow manages, quite gloriously, to break this caricature.
The sugar-coated pop psychedelia of Coldplay’s guitars and Beyoncé’s soulful vocals plays beautifully with the transcendental aesthetic they’ve formed from their tourism advert lucky dip of appropriation, and – to be frank – I just don’t know if I have the willpower not to be carried away by it.
