Zalmoxis was angered: Coldplay in Bucharest

A tale of the Romanian middle class

Chris Martin, singer of Coldplay, is…nothing to me.

I knew of him in the early 2000s, when I still watched TV sometimes. He seemed very pleased with himself.

I gathered that he was supposed to be a kind of Bono ‘reboot’, except taller and from The Yookay—and he is a Yookaydian, a typical product of decades of Thatcherite/(neo-)Blairite deracination, social levelling and remplacement. I can imagine that he refers to himself as British, if strictly necessary, but not that he would ever call himself English.

Yet, however much Chris might want to disavow his Englishness, he embodies a type found only among the English (upper-)middle class. I guess this sort of ‘man’ is—or was—sexually appealing, particularly to a certain kind of American white woman. Its best-known representatives are probably the male characters in Richard Curtis films¹. The persona: complaisant yet vaguely (and so Britishlycharmingly!) impertinent; talk-show witty; ‘likes a laugh’ and ‘doesn’t take himself too seriously’ but takes INJUSTICE and POVERTY very seriously indeed.

An aside: my experience of these chaps is that it doesn’t take much to bring out in them the brittle prickliness of the Anglo striver. The studied twinkle-eyed insouciance quickly dissipates—they first feign hatchling-like incomprehension, then attempt ‘humorous’ passive-aggressive dismissal, then become openly condescending and at last extremely angry—when challenged by opinions outside the bounds of the comfy petit-bourgeois consensus they normally inhabit.

If you can bear it, look at any of these to see Chris Martin unchallenged and in his element (he's a favourite guest of Graham Norton, and maybe that’s all you need to know).

Coldplay the b(l)and

I’m by no means the first to observe that Chris Martin’s band, Coldplay, is ineffably bland. My attention was first forced in their direction by constant repetition of this song on MTV Europe, in mid-1999 (I won’t go into why I was watching so much TV in those daze). The only other Coldplay song I know well is this one, which is slightly more interesting and a maybe a little more sophisticated lyrically/musically.

Even based on my sketchy acquaintance with the music, I’d say that no band better epitomises the managerial mindset in aural form than does Coldplay.

*checks youtube for confirmation*

Yes it’s true:

Listen to that pulsing electronic kickdrum and sparse piano figure! Doesn’t it all just make you want to engage in synergistic consultation with key stakeholders in a safe and supportive working environment where a diversity of perspectives is not only welcomed but actively sought and promoted in all that we do?

The Package and the collision

The Package (also known as The Message, Woke etc) is an indissoluble ideological whole. In the West, no part of it is to be examined or questioned. To do so is to bring oneself under pain of professional and social death.

Still, because it’s PRoGrESsive, it’s not fixed. It can be augmented—e.g. with an extra letter added to the sexual pathologies acronym—but not by YOU, and nothing can ever be subtracted from it. In its current form The Package is semiotically embodied by the infamous In this house, we believe… yard signs.

Amusingly, this one is listed as out of stock on Amazon. Why? Excess of demand or lack of it?

White-collar, middle-class people outside the West (such as those in Romania) accurately associate The Package with the technocratic ‘efficiency’ of Our Democracies, in shining steel-and-glass contrast to the grubby brutalist corruption of their own backward polities². It’s the ideology of a mode of governance and life to which they hope their country will eventually attain.

Because Romanian society remains to be completely ‘Westernised’, the members of its white-collar middle class are aspiring SWPLs/bugmen/cat ladies/wine aunts/NPCs, not fully realised exemplars of these managerial-class archetypes. Romanian ‘underdevelopment’ means that The Package is not yet a bundle of shibboleths professed as a means of signalling conformity to the status quo.

There are many corporate ‘roles’ in Romania's service oriented economy but to date very few of them, as far as I know, are governed by DEI provisions. Thus white-collar professionals’ adherence to (some of) The Articles of The Package is a matter of preference, not coercion. Very few people, for the time being, are compelled to proclaim anti-racism in order to hang onto job and social position.

Their country’s metamorphosis into a fully regimented DEI hive still incomplete, Romanians of the professional middle class nurse a number of misapprehensions about The Package. Among the least serious is that, where Westerners talk of Following The Science or Trusting The Experts, white-collar middle-class Romanians—I mean here those who work in the private sector—talk openly of the virtues of technocracy (they use this very word). It all amounts to the same thing, of course, but in the West The Package, correctly framed, is the ideology of Democracy guided by Experts. It’s not exactly the done thing to talk favourably of technocracy, which has anti-democratic connotations.

A more serious misunderstanding on the part of middle-class professional Romanians is that The Package is strongly ‘white-coded’. This is true in the sense that, leaving aside the hotly disputed ‘genealogy of Woke’, white Westerners are its most ardent devotees. But the thing Romanians don’t comprehend—and this is where they really don’t get it—is that The Package aims at the complete inversion of established hierarchies, which implies the derogation of ‘whiteness’. This means in turn that whites must practice self-effacement in the presence of the subaltern, in all circumstances.

One cannot be a self-respecting white person—also rejecting, as most Romanians of all classes do, feminism and the normalisation of homosexuality—and expect to be completely incorporated into the supranational system of democraticandtransparentgoodgovernance. You cannot have Totalising Technocracy without the gay. Where adherence to The Package is concerned, you cannot pick and choose; it’s all or it's nothing.

So: Romanians of the nascent white-collar professional middle class, as yet unbound by DEI, misunderstand two fundamental aspects of The Package.

(1) It’s anti-white

(2) It’s non-negotiable and indivisible

These misconceptions—along with a congeries of middle-class anxieties and a failed attempt by the band at diversity training—led, in June 2024, to an awkward collision between Coldplay and its Romanian audience.

Coldplay and the anxieties of the Romanian middle class

On 12 and 13 June 2024 Coldplay played at the Romanian National Arena. It’s a big place (50,000 seats), and on both nights they sold it out. The popularity of the band was a surprise to me. White-collar middle-class Romanians are comparatively tough-minded and masculine, but evidently the bloodless psuedo-cosmopolitan faux-optimism of the music and Chris Martin’s delightful persona are more attractive to them than I would have thought. What is the source of this popularity?

My observation is that it can be explained in part by status anxiety. The private-sector, white-collar professional class came into being in Romania only a generation ago, elevated at a stroke from the peasantry and the urban working class (themselves usually only a generation or so out of the countryside). The Romanian ‘Manager, Procurement, Eastern Europe and Caucasus’ is, then, a bit of a hicklib. This is especially so on a continental scale. Romania is in the European boondocks, so that a parvenu urban professional in Romania must strain to assure herself of ‘elite’ status even harder than her West European sisters. Attending a Coldplay gig is a way for her to confirm her sense of arrival in modernity, in communion with others of the same growing social layer.

Technocratic managerialism is alluring to Romanians of the arriviste class for different reasons than it is to their equivalents in the West. To both, its promise is meliorative. But, where the Western type dissembles a ‘luxury belief’ in managerialism’s ability to effect wealth redistribution and the achievement of racial equity, to her Romanian counterpart these objectives are of no interest whatsoever.

Rather, the Romanian white-collar professional is sincerely convinced that the final triumph of technocracy means the conquest of incivility. In her conception, technocracy’s total victory will entail the elimination of public-sector graft³ and the taming of the Romanian wild man who benefits from and perpetuates all forms of corruption. The anarchic spirit of the unreconstructed Romanian peasant (urban or rural), and its uninhibited expression, is a source of constant embarrassment to the Romanian middle-class professional, even though he is usually himself much more obstreperous than the Western norm.

The wildest people in Romania, and the biggest embarrassment to its middle class, are of course the Gypsies. Nothing makes a Romanian squirm more furiously than the conflation by foreigners of Rom and Romanian.⁴ The popularity of technocracy in Romania, and of its white-coded pop-cultural avatars such as Coldplay, is therefore motivated not only by status anxiety but also by what the Left would call racial anxiety. Coldplay is implicit whiteness, and the Gypsies are its antithesis.

Implicit whiteness vs. diversity training

Now let us return to the events of 12 and 13 June 2024, at the Romanian National Arena. On both nights the band had as its (ostensibly impromptu and certainly unannounced) support act a singer called Babasha. Babasha is a Gypsy. DO U LIK ZIS?

This music belongs to a genre called manele. I urge you to read Pimlico Journal's perceptive analysis of the form.

Read it? Good—now you understand everything you have to know about Romania and need read no further.

…

I joke plz u keep reading

Considering what I said above, you might be able to guess the Romanian audience’s reaction to Babasha’s appearance. He was booed! There was a walk-out on a substantial scale! Babasha was also the support act on night 2, and the same thing happened. It’s almost redundant to add that the EUropean press reacted by calling on Romanians to reckon with their racism. What pain it must have caused Romania’s acolytes of technocracy to be rounded on so viciously by the mouthpieces of managerialism…

The media may scold as it will from Berlin or from Brussels. But no Romanian who has a conceit of himself as a civilised EUropean can abide manele, except in the last hour or two of a party or at a wedding—and these are special cases, enjoyed in private among friends. Had Coldplay made the decision to use as its support act a rapper/civil engineer or a reggaeton ‘artist’, there would likely have been no problem. Romanians of the professional middle class aren’t racist—their objection to Gypsies is purely cultural, you see—but manele is the *line in the sand* for their brand of implicit whiteness. Nobody wants to hear that shit at a Coldplay gig.

The band’s (i.e. Chris Martin’s) decision to use a manelist as its support act was thus a massive insult to its Romanian audience. They came to see Coldplay so that they might bathe together in the antiseptic soundscapes of technocratic managerialism; glory for a night in their status as hardworking EUropean private-sector professionals; forget for a while their corruption neurosis; and get away from manele and its unEUropean incivility. In the event, they had global latrine culture rubbed in their faces by precisely the band that they believe represents its antithesis.

Why did you do it to them CHRIS??!!

CHRIS?!

Chris?

He’s not answering, so let me suggest a few possibilities.

The first is that Chris Martin might genuinely have been trying, as he claimed, to give a break to a talented new singer—whom he reckons he discovered as a busker while out for a walk in town; do you feel Chris’s beguilingly spontaneous regular-nice-guy appeal?—all the while being just as ignorant as any Deano of Romanian racial/cultural/class sensitivities. Like most among the global celebrity striver class, Chris Martin is unable and/or unwilling to recognise distinctions among foreign peoples. For all his pretensions to worldliness, he is scarcely more ‘cosmopolitan’, except maybe in his tastes in food and drink, than White Van Man.

The second and more sinister possibility is that Chris might have meant to rub Romanian noses in diversity.

The third and still more sinister explanation is that he acted at the bidding of (((SOMEBODY ELSE))) who wished to rub Romanian noses in diversity, thereby knocking another brick out of the cultural wall.

All are perfectly respectable, and not mutually exclusive, explanations for Chris Martin’s ignominious commission of lèse-majesté.

Now being as I’m not any kind of low-status anti-Semite, I’m not gonna say which one I think is most likely (naturally it’s number 3).

Nevertheless, let’s assume that the first explanation is correct, with the crucial difference that Chris Martin knows that Gypsies are…marginalised(?) in Romania and, further, that he understands the socioeconomic composition of his Romanian audience.

In this interpretation, he booked Babasha less as a musical support act than as a barrier to entry: If you—Romanian white-collar professional with aspirations to becoming a fully-fledged Western-style NPC—want to show that you are a true devotee of Coldplay and the managerial lifeways we represent, you NEED TO⁵ welcome and value diversity in a safe and welcoming environment where diverse perspectives are at the heart of everything we do. In other words, Balasha’s appearance was intended as a form of mass diversity training.

Chris Martin’s statement from the stage, second night, would seem to confirm the above:

"I want to say something. When we landed yesterday, well, two days ago, I wandered the streets and heard this guy singing, so beautifully, on the street. It was as if I had seen the chancellor of Romanian music because there are so many wonderful artists. Maybe you don't understand the kind of people you have in Romania, it's incredible."

Whatever the motive, soon after Chris made his statement, a huge storm assailed the Romanian National Arena. Concert goers testify that amidst the cacophony of thunder and lashing rain, a voice deep as time was heard to intone (in Daco-Latin-Illyrian):

GO WOKE GO BROKE! BEGONE, COLDPLAY, AND NEVER RETURN!

Zalmoxis, Dacian god of sky, was angered…

They haven’t returned since!

1. Not that I’ve seen any of them heheh

2. There is indeed plenty of nepotism and corruption in Romania. However, the phenomenon as it exists in the public sector, which is by no means unique to Romania, is exaggerated both by the press and by establishment politicians themselves, such that it has assumed in the collective mind the status of a corruption neurosis. I suspect that constant talk of corruption is used deliberately to keep Romanians disoriented and disengaged from politics.

3. Again: it is hard to overstate the prevalence among the Romanian white-collar middle class of a mystical belief in the omnipresence of corruption.

4. This racial elision, very common among Deanos in The Yookay, is understandable and more than excusable when all you really want is to have your country back. Why expect a harried Englishman to care about the difference, especially when the appellations Romanian and Rom (ie Gypsy) are so formally similar as to appear designed to confuse? When all is said and done neither Romanians nor ‘Roms’ are British, and they come from the same foreign country.

5. Construction in the form ((pro)noun) ‘need to’ (verb) MUST be abolished. It is naked language of longhouse managerial compulsion.