The one genre that Sting said was a “horrible lowering of musical values”
Rock and roll should never have to put boundaries on what people can do.
The minute that someone gets too elitist about what should and shouldn’t be done in a rock context is usually when bands start playing it too safe, and whether they’ve made great records in the past or not, they’re almost guaranteed to make medicare music the minute they start taking the safe route. And while Sting never claimed to take any shortcuts when making his best material, he felt that some people didn’t have the same outlook on music that he thought everyone should have.
Then again, The Police were always an amalgam of different influences depending on whatever Sting was writing at the time. Some moments could sound like a traditional pop song, there were times when he could turn everything into a reggae song for a few minutes, or Stewart Copeland changing the beat around to turn ‘Roxanne’ into a tango or ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ into a calypso-sounding song.
But that kind of eclecticism was something only a few bands could get away with in the 1970s. The flavours of the day were all about the beginnings of arena rock, and while everyone from Aerosmith to Peter Frampton was working on their own classics by going back to the same blues formula, Sting wanted to work on something a little bit more left-field, similar to the prog bands emerging at the time.
Wanting to branch out is never a bad thing, but developing a taste for prog music in England circa 1977 would be like someone deciding they wanted to start a hair metal band in 1995. The world was now dominated by punk rock, and as much as The Police learned to embrace some of those sounds when making their first albums, Sting said that he couldn’t have been happier once that initial wave died down.
The band were proud to have played places like CBGBs, but there was no point in Sting trying to lower himself down to rudimentary playing, saying, “When the punk thing happened, it was get punk or get out of town. For me, it was a horrible lowering of musical values. It was difficult to play these simplistic songs at breakneck speed with total distortion while the audience was gobbing at you. Happily, it wasn’t long before we got out of that, and started to slowly develop our own thing.”
At the same time, it’s not like Sting was that bad at writing those kinds of tunes. Many people would have been happy to have written something like ‘Next to You’ or ‘Truth Hits Everybody’, but even by the standards of many of the punk bands, they couldn’t manage to keep up with the quirky fills that Copeland was doing or wrap their heads around the bizarre tones that Andy Summers was getting out of his guitar.
But when you look at the band’s career going forward, it’s easy to see what Sting was talking about. A song like ‘Synchronicity II’ has all the production of a classic pop song, but considering how many strange twists and turns it takes throughout its runtime, it’s not like Sting was trying to go back to the same well that bands like The Clash were drawing from when making their songs. His music had to be something a bit more sophisticated.
Sting may have had a higher standard for what he wanted to play than punk rockers, but let’s get one thing straight: it wasn’t about how trying to turn his nose up at a certain genre. Every style has its place in the world, but the frontman simply had more fun challenging himself than staying in the same lane that every other underground band in England was subjecting themselves to.
