The massive ballad that Sting dismissed as a “pile of crap”
Everything that Sting ever worked on needed to have some level of excitement behind it.
If there was ever a moment where he felt like his career was getting a little bit stagnant, that either meant it was time for him to work on a new album entirely or start getting some fresh blood into his solo band. But whenever he saw what his other legends were capable of, there was a 50/50 chance on whether he would see it as exceptional or a piece of junk.
Then again, a lot of what Sting was all about came back to pop songs. He knew that a record was never finished unless he had something that perked up people’s ears, and as much as he was interested in moving into the realm of jazz and easy-listening territory from time to time, there was a reason why songs like ‘If I Ever Lose My Faith In You’ had a prime spot on his records rather than throwing in every single musical exercise he could think of at the wall.
But if you were working in the golden age of MTV, you needed to do something a little bit more than having a decent song on the charts. The biggest names in music were now people like Prince and Madonna strutting their stuff across MTV, but by the time that The Police became the biggest names in music, you couldn’t have avoided Michael Jackson if you tried. Thriller was everywhere, and even if ‘Every Breath You Take’ was inescapable, it paled in comparison to the reign of terror ‘The King of Pop’ had on the charts.
It’s not like Sting and Jackson were unfriendly or anything, either. Sting was accounted for when working on the charity single ‘We Are the World’, so he at least had a healthy respect for what everyone in the room was doing. Then again, there’s a difference between making a great song for a good cause and making a record too saccharine, and by the 1990s, Sting had about had enough of what Jackson was doing to save the planet.
There were great moments on his previous records, but Sting felt that there was no point in making a track like ‘Earth Song’, saying at the time, “I wouldn’t write a song like Michael Jackson’s ‘Earth Song,’ which I think is a pile of crap, and the video’s even worse. Michael brings the trees back to life?. He brings people back to life? He brings life back to dead soil? Jesus Christ! He’s God!”
Admittedly, Jackson’s ballads had started to become a little too sentimental around the time he started making tracks like ‘Heal the World’, but whereas that song at least had a functional hook behind it, ‘Earth Song’ doesn’t really have that. The whole thing feels like one long verse that never breaks into a chorus, which gets pretty annoying when you start hearing it for minutes on end without changing.
And the most egregious part for the bassist was hearing him change key midway through the tune, saying, “And you know the worst thing about that song? It’s that semi-tone modulation in the middle. That is just beyond it.” Even though a key change is almost a magical way to pick up a fairly ordinary chord progression, you almost need to earn a key change, and when Jackson does it in this song, all it does is make all of the other lacklustre parts of the tune float up to the surface even more.
So when Sting was talking about Jackson not getting the right sound for the song, he seemed to be complaining in the same way that any athlete would look at one of their fellow star players miss a shot. It doesn’t diminish any of the other things that they did, but given their track record, they should know better than to make something this bad.
