Faster, higher, proggier…

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[4.10]

Alfred Soto: The Killers’ Day & Age had more fans on the Olympic committee than anyone realized.
[1]

Brad Shoup: So has Muse finally figured out the difference between bombast and piss-take? If you’d told me this was the theme to Skyfall I’d have believed you. No matter; this is going to be the easiest check Storm Thorgerson’s ever cashed.
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: Did the people organizing the London Olympics watch the Beijing opening ceremony? That was pure spectacle, watch it again. I doubt the 2012 ceremony isn’t going to touch 2008, but if London wanted Freddie Mercury or a Viking choir, they should have just gotten holograms, people love those things. Instead, the world gets Muse.
[1]

Iain Mew: Are they taking the piss? Does it matter? The lyrics are undeniably terrible, but they’re harmless and Muse have never met any qualification standard on those. What does make “Survival” stand out is that they haven’t gone for gold with spectacle to this extent in a long time, or at least not without making listening an endurance event. They’ve taken to the idea of Olympic stadium rock by making their music faster (the new, jauntier, take on Queen), higher (Matt Bellamy’s shrieking falsetto, repeating the awesome trick from “Muscle Museum” an age ago where he becomes indistinguishable from a guitar squeal) and stronger (the hard-edged riffing that blows the song up at the end). All the things that I find most thrilling about Muse, pushed a bit further. I would actually like them to have gone for it even more ridiculously. I hope that Tokyo wins the 2020 bidding and Momoiro Clover Z are still around to beat Muse’s Olympic record.
[9]

Will Adams: I fail to see how something so cartoonish could offer any motivation to Olympic athletes, or anyone else, for that matter. The better moments, such as the crunchy instrumental break around the 3:00 mark, are wholly undercut by the choral silliness and musical theatre piano. And then there are the lyrics, which would have sounded ridiculous even without Bellamy’s vocal histrionics. At least “Waka Waka” gave you the comfort of a different language so you couldn’t tell that a string of “uplifting” platitudes were being systematically dumped into your ears.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: My Chemical Romance, only with sports instead of comic books. Which makes all the difference.
[0]

Josh Langhoff: I can totally understand hating Muse, but picking this song for the Olympics is like adopting that Little Shop of Horrors plant as your state flower.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Muse does musical theater, I guess? The beginning is “Nowadays” from Chicago; you can even sing that instead of this mess, albeit a bit slower, with a few chords wrong and with an angry guitar upstaging you. The rest is either Jekyll and Hyde when he’s Hyde, Sweeney Todd when he’s berserk, Jesus Christ Superstar before Judas hangs himself, “Hellfire” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame with the lust sublimated into guitar wank, a bunch of YouTube shredders trying to restage Orff, and if these are getting progressively more ridiculous….
[5]

Colin Small: I’ve never really liked Queen very much, but if all of their songs had been recorded as theme music for the Summer Olympics, I would have a much better opinion of them. It’s hard to make music that is both impactful and over the top. Here, however, all corniness is perfectly appropriate, as are the wailing guitar solos.
[7]

Jer Fairall: Would have been a better fit for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Mordor.
[3]