The Number Ones: Coldplay & BTS’ “My Universe”

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

You can't embarrass Chris Martin. It's simply not possible. Chris Martin can embarrass somebody else, especially if that person happens to be on an illicit extramarital date at a Coldplay show, but he can't do it to himself. Martin is willing to do whatever. A performance on QVC? An attempt at a viral stunt in a karaoke bar? A COVID-era remote cover song with a bunch of other famous people? Martin is down for all of it. In retrospect, it's a small miracle that he wasn't in the Gal Gadot "Imagine" video. Maybe his phone was charging and he missed the text.

Coldplay were a huge band almost from the moment that they arrived, but their grandly uplifting post-Radiohead melodic sweep wasn't enough to push them to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. For that, they needed something extra. In 2008, Coldplay pulled it off with "Viva La Vida," thanks at least in part to the fact that they did dancing-silhouette duty in an iTunes commercial. In order to make their grand return to the #1 spot 13 years later, Coldplay needed to do more. They brought in Max Martin, the Swedish mega-pop overlord, as a writer and producer. (Max Martin and Chris Martin are not related, by the way.) And they duetted with BTS, the K-pop group whose fanbase absolutely controlled the Hot 100 in 2021.

"My Universe" was a terribly embarrassing song when it came out, and it's a terribly embarrassing song today. Coldplay, evidently desperate for another worldwide hit, punched in two cheat codes at the same time. They gave that song the full media push, shot a clangingly ugly sci-fi video for it, and sold it as the kind of thing that could bring a divided world together. The song itself was always going to be secondary to the spectacle of its release. Even with that in mind, "My Universe" is a complete nonentity, a profoundly meaningless piece of stadium mush that drowns in its own cynical sincerity. If you get caught cheating on your partner to "My Universe," that's your fault. You should be embarrassed. Chris Martin should be embarrassed, too. He's not, and that somehow makes it worse.

Coldplay needed a hit. Well, Coldplay felt like they needed a hit. They really didn't. After "Viva La Vida" and the album of the same title, Coldplay probably had enough hits. They could've kept touring arenas for the rest of their lives, like they were Journey. But Chris Martin is not the type of celebrity to settle into a chill and lucrative nostalgia-circuit existence. Nor is he the type to follow his own exploratory artistic muse into weirder realms, taking his biggest fans on an aesthetic ride and letting everyone else slowly drift away.

Instead, Martin is the type who seems to see a holy vocation in continuing to make hits deep into middle age. This stuff matters to him. He thinks that this is his calling. I'm putting all of this on Chris Martin because he's the most visible Coldplay member by far. I get the feeling that the band is a Maroon 5 situation and the other guys are just along for the ride. Maybe I'm wrong. In any case, Coldplay made some big hits after "Viva La Vida" — "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall," "Paradise," "Magic" — but none of those songs cracked the top 10 in the US. Instead, to score late-career hits, Coldplay had to venture into the realm of electronic dance music.

"A Sky Full Of Stars" really wasn't embarrassing. In 2014, Coldplay joined forces with the late Swedish dance visionary Avicii and made a swooning, longing love song full of ramp-ups and bass-drops. This was the EDM-boom equivalent of all the rock bands who attempted to go disco in the late '70s, but it really wasn't that big of a stretch for Coldplay. Martin makes a perfectly credible dance diva, and Coldplay's early arena-shimmer hits practically begged for the remix treatment. The pounding pianos and geometrically precise acoustic guitars of "A Sky Full Of Stars" lined up nicely with the folk-EDM thing that Avicii was already doing, and the song reached #10 — Coldplay's first time in the top 10 in eight years. (It's a 7. I gave it a 6 in the last Coldplay column, but I'm upgrading it.)

"Something Just Like This," on the other hand, was pretty embarrassing. In 2017, during the fleeting moment that former Number Ones artists the Chainsmokers were absolutely fucking huge, Chris Martin jumped on a song with them and did his usual big-stage yearning thing. (All the Coldplay guys, I'm just learning now, were involved with that one. I thought it was just Martin, but I was wrong.) "Something Like This" sounds like a cheaper, more obvious version of "A Sky Full Of Stars," and the song went all the way to #3. (It's a 4.) As obvious a commercial move as that was, though, it was Nebraska compared to "My Universe."

Every once in a while, Coldplay try to strip things back and make something artistic. That's what they did on 2019's Everyday Life, a double album that was rumored to be the band's farewell. It didn't sell. Everyday Life was the first Coldplay album that didn't at least go platinum in the US, and none of its singles reached the Hot 100. But it was the band's first time working with Max Martin, who Chris Martin met backstage at a 2016 Rihanna concert in Sweden. Max Martin didn't write or produce anything on Everyday Life, but he did play keyboards on the flop single "Orphans."

Coldplay never toured behind Everyday Life, but they recorded their 2021 album Music Of The Spheres with the intent of heading out on the road. They had a whole eco-friendly stadium-tour setup in mind, and the music on Music Of The Spheres was always intended to soundtrack that kind of spectacle. You can tell. Coldplay recorded the entire thing with Max Martin and with Oscar Holter, the Swedish Martin associate who has already been in this column for his work on the Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" and "Save Your Tears." The album tracks feed the band's gentle warmth through that Swedish ultra-pop filter, the kind of precision synthpop that Max Martin does better than anyone else on the planet. It wasn't enough. Lead single "Higher Power" sounds like Coldplay attempting to make their own version of "Blinding Lights." It's embarrassing, and it peaked at #53.

At some point, Chris Martin got a text asking if he'd be interested in writing a song for BTS. I wonder how many Western pop stars got similar texts. BTS and Hybe, the South Korean corporation behind the group, were consistently hungry for Western recognition. They wanted to conquer the Hot 100 multiple times. They wanted Grammys. They wanted total cultural domination. Coldplay were far past their prime when one of those BTS reps reached out to Martin, but they still filled stadiums around the world, including in Seoul. (In a documentary short about the making of "My Universe," one BTS member lamented being unable to go to a Coldplay show in Seoul a few years earlier.) Coldplay represented the Western establishment. Moreover, Martin's whole vibe of vague positivity fit the BTS image.

Around the time that the song came out, Chris Martin told Zane Lowe that he had both the potential BTS assignment and the "My Universe" title in his mind when he asked an associate named Bill Rahko for some beats. Rahko, a Wisconsin native, is a recording engineer who has worked on some big records. He'd been in Coldplay's orbit for years, and he has something to do with running ProTools at the band's live shows. Rahko, who got writing and production credit on "My Universe," gave Martin a loop that he'd made. Martin listened to it while driving, and a chorus popped into his head. He told Max Martin that he thought he had a song for BTS, and Max told him that he should keep the song and bring it to BTS, which is how the collaboration came about.

Chris Martin went through all the red tape necessary to visit Seoul mid-pandemic, and he got all the BTS guys into a room with him to record. In that doc, one of the BTS guys admits that the whole thing could've easily been done remotely, but it was better in person because they could make it "more sincere." All the BTS guys talked about how amazing it was to meet and record with Martin. At the time, BTS and Martin were in the middle of a coy public dance, perpetually alluding to the idea that maybe, who knows, they'd make a song together someday. Early in 2021, for instance, BTS taped an episode of MTV Unplugged used the opportunity to cover Coldplay's eternal banger "Fix You," a song that peaked at #59 when it came out in 2005.

BTS members RM, Suga, and J-Hope all got involved with writing their Korean-language parts on "My Universe." You don't need to speak the either language to know that the different vocalists on "My Universe" are just offering the most anodyne love-song sentiments in the world. Martin told Zane Lowe, "It's a song about love that's difficult or forbidden or you can't quite get it together." Where's the difficulty, though? What's the struggle, exactly? The song never says. There's one lyric that hints broadly in that direction — "They said we can't be together because we come from different sides" — but it never commits to an actual meaning. You're supposed to project your own struggle onto the song and derive your own meaning, but it's hard to do that when nobody even pretends to express anything.

Martin has said that Music Of The Spheres was partly inspired by the Mos Eisley cantina scene from the first Star Wars, the idea of different music being made in different galaxies. (He shouldn't say that. That's embarrassing.) Most of the album follows an extremely fuzzy space theme, so that's presumably why he forced the word "universe" in there. Beyond that, though, it's just the world's most generic love song. Greeting cards routinely display romantic sentiments with more depth and grace than this song.

The chorus seems like it should be catchy. It's simple and direct enough: "You! You are! My universe! And I! Just wanna! Put you first!" The hook is built for full-stadium singalongs, but I can never remember it when I'm not actively listening to the song. Did Martin write the song about Dakota Johnson, his fiancé at the time? If he did, he never said so. It's kind of fun to think about Don Johnson shaking his fist at Chris Martin on his front lawn, telling him that he can't date Dakota because they come from different sides, but I don't think that happened. (Don Johnson's highest-charting single, 1986's "Heartbeat," peaked at #5. It's a 4.) There's simply no evidence to suggest that anyone was trying to say anything on "My Universe." And if they were trying, they failed.

The song itself is a version of airless disco-pop that was already outdated by late 2021. Chris Martin chants his echo-drenched, nagging chorus over what's clearly supposed to be strutting rhythm-section action. The BTS guys breeze into the track pretty naturally, and their harmonies make sense, but their presence doesn't signify anything other than the fact that Coldplay scored a prized BTS feature. Coldplay and their collaborators surround the extremely basic melody with vocoderized vocals and tingly-jingly guitars and big synth blats, and but all that stuff just makes the song more aggressively ingratiating and less fun. It sounds like a tech CEO's presentation of a new product. Even the most out-there moment, the blog-house breakdown that ends the song, is there for strictly utilitarian purposes — in this case, so that the BTS guys could dance while performing it.

If "My Universe" was just a replacement-level pop song, that would be one thing. It's not that, though. For one thing, it's not good enough to meet the "replacement-level" bar. It's flat and empty and dull, like one of those songs that seems to exist specifically to soundtrack an interstitial montage on Love Island. You know how one of the Islanders will be like, "I'm excited to explore this relationship" and the soundtrack will immediately pipe up with a generic and possibly AI-generated pop song about being excited to explore a relationship? "My Universe" sounds like one of those. It also sounds like a marketing plan in musical form, a calculation that this specific combination of factors can drag Coldplay back to #1.

That feeling extends all the way to the video, which comes from veteran big-budget music video director Dave Meyers. At the beginning, script on the screen lays out a ridiculous interstellar storyline about a future where music is forbidden and renegade bands must do battle with "the Silencers." What follows is a way-too-busy, insanely ugly montage of CGI splooge, with Coldplay and BTS appearing in each other's worlds via hologram. (They didn't film their parts together, naturally.) If the "My Universe" video came out today, I'd assume that the whole thing was AI slop, but it came out at a time just before we had to worry about that. Someone had to pay money to make that thing.

"My Universe" did what it was supposed to do. The song debuted at #1, presumably thanks to many digital purchases from the BTS Army. Coldplay followed the BTS model, releasing a bunch of alternate versions. As a result, "My Universe" became one of the songs that briefly interrupted the long reign of Justin Bieber and the Kid Laroi's "Stay." The week that "My Universe" topped the chart, I got a chance to hang out with fellow pop-chart watcher Chris Molanphy at our friend Jack's wedding, and we both rolled our eyes about the chart placement for "My Universe." One week later, "My Universe" plummeted out of the top 10, down to #12. The song got a bit of pop airplay in the US, but not enough to stick around. Coldplay and BTS performed it together at the American Music Awards in November, and then it became part of Coldplay's stadium shows, but it otherwise vanished from view.

The "My Universe" single went platinum exactly once, and Music Of The Spheres became the second Coldplay album that didn't at least go platinum in the US. One more album track scraped the Hot 100 when "Let Somebody Go," a collaboration with former Number Ones artist Selena Gomez, peaked at #91. But the album gave Coldplay an excuse to do some more touring, and they definitely did that. The band embarked on a global stadium trek in March 2022, and they kept that tour going all the way through to September 2025. Wikipedia tells me that Coldplay's Music Of The Spheres tour is the most-attended tour of all time. Thirteen million bought tickets to those shows, compared to 10 million for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour (which, to be fair, was shorter and had fewer dates). At least two of those people probably wish they hadn't bought those Coldplay tickets.

At those shows, Coldplay would do a thing where their Jumbotron camera showed random people in the crowd and then Chris Martin sang to them. At a Boston show last July, the camera captured a middle-aged couple all snuggled up together. As soon as they saw themselves onscreen, they immediately shied away from each other in terrified humiliation. The woman covered her face and turned her back on the camera. The guy, taking a split-second longer to respond, ducked out of frame. Martin, narrating the whole moment, said, "Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy." It was fucking hilarious.

They were having an affair, obviously. You knew that. Martin probably knew it, too. The affair had consequences. The guy turned out to be Andy Byron, CEO of a tech company called Astronomer, and the woman was Kristin Cabot, the company's HR chief. They were both married to other people. The video went super-viral, Byron stepped down from the company. There were rumors that he wanted to sue Coldplay, but it never happened. A few months later, The New York Times ran a fawning profile about Cabot living her life after her "ritual shaming."

In a world where we so rarely get to see tech-CEO types face anything resembling consequences for their actions, that little moment resonated. The TikTok video is easily Coldplay's greatest hit since "Viva La Vida." It's way better than "My Universe." It had more of a societal impact, it lingered in the cultural conversation for longer, and it sparked more joy. That video is the kind of word-of-mouth phenomenon that record companies would love to manufacture but can't. Coldplay don't need to be embarrassed about that one. Someone should be embarrassed, but not them.

There's been more music, too. In the middle of that tour, Coldplay released an album called Moon Music, a kind of companion to Music Of The Spheres. Lead single "feelslikeimfallinginlove" peaked at #81, and then nothing else from the album charted. If you missed it, don't worry about it. You're fine. Just watch that kiss-cam video again instead. If Coldplay are shameless enough to release a song like "My Universe," they're always a threat to appear in this column again, but I doubt it'll happen. You can only hit the BTS-collab button once — not that Coldplay didn't try it again.

In 2022, Coldplay co-wrote BTS member Jin's solo single "The Astronaut." Chris Martin played on the single and sang backup and everything. The song peaked at #51 — high enough to stand as Jin's biggest solo hit, but not high enough to be an actual hit. (I was like, "Wait, isn't there already a Coldplay song called 'The Astronaut'?" But no, I was thinking of "The Scientist." That's a song.) This summer, Martin serves at the the "curator" of the World Cup Finals' first-ever halftime show, happening in a couple of weeks in New Jersey, and BTS will perform at that. Martin will probably sing "My Universe" with BTS there, and maybe he'll try to hit the BTS-collab button again. I doubt it'll work.

BTS are a different story. Over here, "My Universe" is the last entry in that string of BTS chart-toppers. The group's imperial era didn't fade out, though. Instead, it came with a hard expiration date. Even after South Korea changed its national laws to allow BTS a little more global domination, the group's seven members all had to sign up for their compulsory military service eventually. As a result, BTS were forced to hit the pause button.

BTS had a few more minor hits in the stretch after "My Universe." In 2022, they made it to #13 with "Yet To Come," a song from an anthology, and they guested alongside Snoop Dogg on Benny Blanco's "Bad Decisions," which peaked at #10. (It's a 6.) Later that year, though, Hybe confirmed that BTS would have to take a break so the members could do their military stuff, and the company's stock took a $1.7 billion plunge.

A lot of K-pop boy bands disappear forever because of that military service requirement. BTS did not. During their hiatus, the group still reached #48 with their single "Take Two." All seven members put out solo music, and we'll see a couple of them in this column. Last year, the final BTS member finished that government-mandated two-year break, and the group got back together. They're not currently at the level of absolute pop-chart hegemony that they were in 2021, but they're still big. We'll see them in this column again.

GRADE: 2/10

BONUS BEATS: "My Universe" is a song without a cultural footprint; it's not like wedding bands across America have spent the past few years figuring out how to cover it. But Coldplay did commission a remix from the similarly shameless EDM producer David Guetta, so here's that:

(David Guetta's three biggest hits — the 2011 Usher collab "Without You," the 2012 Nicki Minaj collab "Turn Me On," and the 2022 Bebe Rexha collab "I'm Good (Blue)" — all peaked at #4. "Without You" is a 5, "Turn Me On" is a 3, and "I'm Good (Blue)" is a 7.)

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Buy the book and make my wallet light up inside. Actually, don't do that. It won't work. I'm not getting any royalties because thing will never sell enough to recoup. Also, my wallet doesn't light up when there's more money in it. So just buy the book if you want to read it.