The Police song that was “grossly misunderstood” by critics
The lifecycle of a song begins long before audiences hear it for the first time. It starts with the initial source of inspiration, whether it’s a dream or a conversation with a stranger. The songwriter then fleshes out that idea, poeticising it and pulling it together in a notes app or on a piece of paper. The song goes through drafts and second drafts, live shows and studio sessions, and collaboration with band members and producers before finalisation.
It might then be pressed to wax or uploaded onto streaming services, the action of which signifies a relinquishment of ownership on the songwriter’s part. No matter what the original inspiration for the composition was or what it came to mean to them personally, audiences are now free to interpret the track for themselves, to impose their own meanings on it.
This is the beauty of songwriting, but not all musicians revel in the subjectivity that comes with releasing your music. Some artists struggle with the misinterpretation of their lyricism, especially when it insults their songwriting abilities. For Sting, there was one song he penned for The Police that he believed was “grossly misunderstood,” as he once told NME.
The Police were one of the biggest bands in the new wave scene, and Sting was the driving creative force behind the microphone and in writing sessions. He penned the majority of the band’s biggest hits, including the reggae-infused ‘Roxanne’, the tender ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’, and the eerie ‘Every Breath You Take’.
Sting’s songs were fairly straightforward lyrically, but there was one song that got lost in translation with audiences. In the winter of 1980, following the success of ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’, The Police unveiled ‘De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da’. It was a classic Police song, driven by Sting’s voice and twangy instrumentation, but the lyrics confused some critics.
“De do do do, de da da da, is all I want to say to you,” Sting sings in the chorus, “De do do do, de da da da, they’re meaningless and all that’s true.” According to the songwriter, the song was misunderstood by those who reviewed it, who thought that the chorus imitated baby talk. “The lyrics are about banality, about the abuse of words,” he clarified.
This becomes clearer when you listen to Sting’s words in the verses as well as the chorus. “Poets, priests and politicians have words to thank for their positions,” the frontman sings in the second verse, for example, “Words that scream for your submission, and no one ‘s jamming their transmission.”
The gibberish that makes up the chorus isn’t just Sting doing baby talk. Instead, he’s using nonsensical sounds to comment on our tendency to give in words and phrases that sound nice without giving them a little more thought. In fact, the response to the song, which barely looked past the choruses, almost served his point.
Rather than considering why Sting had filled his chorus with rubbish, with “de do do do”s and “de da da da”s, audiences simply assumed that the song was mimicking the sounds babies make and had no deeper meaning. It doesn’t take much more investigation to figure out the meaning of the song — Sting’s verses weren’t necessarily subtle — so it’s easy to see why he felt some frustration with audience responses.
The subjectivity of music is still one of the greatest things about the medium, but it can require audiences to look a little deeper than surface level sometimes. Even for a Police tune.
