The rock songs Sting dismissed as complete garbage: “There’s a whole genre”
Compared to every other rock and roll songwriter, Sting needed a bit more sophistication in what he was playing.
There were definitely moments where he could make a simple pop song, but looking under the hood of a lot of those Police hits, there’s a lot more going on than a simple four-chord masterpiece that would top the charts today. That’s because he wanted to give his audience a little bit more, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate a nice dumb hook whenever it reared its head.
By the end of The Police, though, that’s not the kind of music Sting wanted to make anymore. He had advanced well beyond being the teenybopper band that the power trio were being treated like, and by the end of Synchronicity, The Dream of the Blue Turtles threw everything in the opposite direction. He was now working with everyone from jazz greats to veteran session players, and he wanted to make sure that he could create the sounds he heard in his head when making a song like ‘Fortress Around Your Heart’.
And that only came from him listening to some of the best players that weren’t necessarily rock and roll. Any jazz lover like Sting was going to kneel at the altar of Jaco Pastorius from a bass-playing perspective, but the kind of harmonies he was using fit somewhere between typical fusion changes, Steely Dan-style chords, and the kind of structure that would have made Frank Zappa give an approving nod.
At this point, I need to remind you that, yes, this is the same guy who made such lyrical masterpieces as ‘De Do Do Do De Da Da Da’. He was guilty of taking himself way too seriously on occasion, but when he did decide to throw out some goofy lyrics every now and again, he wanted to make sure that he slid a little bit of philosophy or some additional message through to the listener.
Besides, that’s what a lot of the titans of rock and roll were doing before Sting came along. The golden age of rock and roll had the likes of Chuck Berry and Little Richard exciting audiences everywhere, but if you look at the onomatopoeic lines that they were delivering, it’s not like they were going to be competing with the folkies like Bob Dylan that came forward a few years later with something real to say.
So when Sting was making his more goofy lyrics, he wanted to take those subpar lyrics and flip them on their head, saying, “Some of my favorite rock-‘n’-roll records are complete garbage. Little Richard songs; ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’; ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’. . . . There’s a whole genre of things that don’t make any sense, really, but I love them. What ‘De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da’ tries to do is intellectualize them.
If you really think about it, though, making those songs based on nonsense wasn’t about filling in the gaps of the music. Whenever Little Richard screamed, it was one of the most exciting sounds in the world for people like Paul McCartney, and even if it didn’t fit in with the more high-brow rock and roll at the time, there was a certain pride in making something that was deliberately provocative.
And while Sting was more than welcome to take his own songs in different directions, there’s still a reason why those rock and roll tunes speak to him years after they came out. He can try making strange chords and look for the kind of music that surprises him at every turn, but the best rock and roll is dictated by the feeling that you get rather than the chords or prose behind every line.
