The one 1990s band that Sting said was “perfect”
Every piece of music that Sting ever played was always focused on moving forward in some capacity.
He could have easily made a mint playing with The Police for the rest of his career, but judging by the amount of creative risks that have paid off in his solo records, he was going to be much more satisfied playing with his sound than performing the same rendition of ‘Roxanne’ every single night. Music was always about forward progression, and even he could see rock and roll going in a new direction by the 1990s.
But for all of the great bands that the decade of irony spat out, it was also going to be extremely deadly to half the bands working circa 1988. Sting was far from the hair metal of the day, but even when he was making records like The Soul Cages, an album like Nevermind was going to look like a shadow in the background of rock just one year later. Most legends would have been pissed, but for Sting, this was wildly exciting.
Because if you think about it, a lot of the experiments Sting wanted to do weren’t all that different from what the alternative scene was already up to. He may have gone down the same road that people like Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon did by working with professional industry legends, but the need to hear different sounds on every record is half the reason listening to early Smiths and Pixies records were so exciting.
Even for the 1990s, though, the fact that Red Hot Chili Peppers began gaining traction was absolutely insane. They had no business trying to compete with Nevermind when they put out Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and yet songs like ‘Give It Away’ and ‘Under the Bridge’ feels as essential to the sound of the 1990s as ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ or ‘Jeremy’ from around the same time.
The funk rockers were always going to be an acquired taste when they played live and wore only socks when they played their encores, but Sting found the whole thing pretty refreshing, saying, “I like these young bands now like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, that wiry naked tension they have. At the same time, I don’t want to try to be hip and hanging out. I don’t need to do that. There’s something very strange about that.”
Granted, it’s not like the Peppers were trying to please the intellectuals in the audience when they did this. It was practically a throwback to the days when things were about free love, and while that did come back to bite them in the ass a little bit when playing Woodstock 1999, they always made up for it by making music that had much more heart than the funk music your average frat boy would love.
For them, this was an art project in the same way that Sting viewed his albums, and while they did have considerably less skill than the jazz players that Sting worked with, they were still willing to push themselves. They didn’t have the resources to get massive orchestras or any other instruments back in the day, but the ending of a song like ‘Funky Monks’ feels like Flea making up the kind of bass line that you would hear out of a jazz band.
It was going to take more than a passing interest for Sting to get up there donning his sock in his most vulnerable place, but he could still respect it from afar. After all, rock and roll was all about freedom of expression, and whether it was him singing ‘Fields of Gold’ or the band bouncing up and down the stage singing ‘Suck My Kiss’, it was all in the service of harnessing that energy with the crowd.
