A guy says something vaguely banal and you stop liking his band? You're setting high standards.

If one elects to view Coldplay and their clones as something "damaging" (and I am not arguing that they aren't), then Radiohead have to carry the can for that.

I'm not sure whether Oasis have much influence anymore. But I suppose that the ilk of Arctic Monkeys are an outgrowth of Britpop culture. In which case I suppose someone should invent a timemachine and drown Britpop at birth. So that's the Happy Mondays out of the way.

Far more damaging than Coldplay and even Arctic fucking Monkeys has been the corporate R&B and Hop Hop scene. At least the Coldplay gang write and play their own music. Rock will survive them. But soul isn't going to rise again, not from the sustained gangrape it has suffered over the past decade. The last good year in R&B was 1999. Since then, almost exclusively forgettable shit.