The one genre that Sting could happily live without
Sting didn’t want to be the kind of musician that was limited to only one genre whenever he made a record.
He had his time being one of the greatest frontmen of the late 1970s when the Police debuted, but even when confined to a trio, Sting was all over the map whenever he made a record, whether that was throwing in a bit of reggae here, a bit of punk there, or even the occasional freaky track that didn’t have a genre. But while a lot of his songs focused on getting a great melody before anything else, there were a handful of genres that he felt he had moved on from after a while.
But compared to every other pop singer, Sting wasn’t the kind to put borders around anything he did, either. No genre was technically off the table, but there was a good chance that fans didn’t need to be on the lookout for his latest foray into polka or trying his hand to make a pure bluegrass affair when he first left the band. The Dream of the Blue Turtles was eclectic, but a lot of it revolved around the biggest names in jazz whenever he played.
The bassist wanted to make something a bit more sophisticated than what the average rock and roll artist was capable of, and when you listen to records like The Soul Cages, you can definitely hear what he’s going for. It’s still decent music, but there’s a good chance that everyone listening to ‘Roxanne’ didn’t want anything to do with the kind of adult contemporary schlock that this sounded like.
But Sting wasn’t going to regress just for the hell of it, either. He had that phase of his career, and while he was content to move on, he did find time to make a handful of decent rockers on his records too. He hadn’t lost his ear for hooks, but even if people had to tolerate a song like ‘Fields of Gold’, they would be rewarded with a song like ‘She’s Too Good For Me’ that had more of a bounce behind it.
The tunes still sounded great, but compared to the traditional rock and rollers that came before him, Sting felt that he didn’t really need to go back to that kind of genre ever again if he didn’t want to, saying, “I like to think I’m less about rock & roll and more about songs. I think songwriting is a tradition that’s older than rock & roll. I could live without rock & roll I haven’t got this sort of religious reverie for rock & roll. I think it’s incredibly reactionary and boring.”
Most people would probably be crying sell out at this point in the article, but it’s not like Sting wasn’t going to get to this part of his career eventually. He was following in the footsteps of the songwriters that came before him, and when you look at the artists he surrounded himself with, are we all going to say that people like Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon are making the same tunes that would have been called rock and roll nowadays?
Absolutely not, and that’s okay. Sting liked the idea of making rock and roll tunes for as long as he could, but since he had studied music for years before he even formed The Police, there was never any sense of him trying to unlearn what he had already done. And since the true rock and rollers were young men by the time that Sting began his solo career, the fact that he could still crank out more than a few great tracks like ‘Shape of My Heart’ was the best statement he could have made at the time.
The rock and roll world doesn’t usually like to see their heroes grow up and get old, but Sting is one of the few examples of someone that actually tried their hand at being more professional and pulled it off. He didn’t like the idea of being purely rock and roll for the rest of his life, and while that may have been heartbreaking for some fans, that suited him just fine if it meant working with the likes of Dominic Miller later in his career.
