For no readily apparent reason, I selected a clutch of `choons by ye olde Police for my walk to work this morning. Playing a quick paced game of beat the clock, I decided to eschew the subway option (as I'm often keen to do, being that I pretty much loathe the entire subway commute experience) in favor of a purposeful stride up Broadway, scored by some of the more energetic blasts by one of the world's former biggest bands.
Strikes me that the Police never got much respect. Villified in the Punk Rock community they initially aspired to be part of, lambasted for their appropriation and arguable bleaching of reggae (there's some quote by Elvis Costello about how Gordon "Sting" Sumner strenuously needed to drop the faux-Jamaican accent) and roundly derided for the haughty antics of their de facto leader, the afore-mentioned Sting (despite the fact that the band was initially ex-Curved Air drummer, Stewart Copeland's brainchild), the Police seemed to attract as many enemies as fans.
I remember first hearing them when my sister brought home a copy of Zenyatta Mondatta after a trip to England. Despite the fact that they looked like a bunch of pretty boy pin-ups, there was certainly no arguing with the propulsive punch of "Driven to Tears" (the opening buckshot drums of said track still get my blood pumping) and they sounded like they had the chops to back up the all the preening. I gradually became a fan, immersing myself wholly in the follow-up album, 1981's undersung Ghost In the Machine (by which point my sister had seemingly undergone a rigorous taste-ectomy -- abandoning the Police in favor of indefensible crap like DeBarge, Michael Jackson, Evelyn "Champagne" King and the like). I remember buying Ghost... the same day I bought Concrete by 999 and Give the People What They Want by the Kinks in the record department at long-vanished Gimbels on East 86th & Lexington Avenue. Much like many of the bands that would become my favorites, the Police were born of Punk but never truly fit in with the safety-pinned horde (much like, say, the Stranglers, Devo and Killing Joke). There was simply more to them than high voltage, three-chord ramalama (although I love their Punk-aspiring tracks like "Nothing Achieving," "Fallout" and the truly awesome "Dead End Job," wherein Sting bleats out an empassioned "CUNTS!"). They were consummate musicians, like or not, and ultimately not ashamed to display same.
It wouldn't last, of course. Sometime around Synchronicity -- when Sting was gruesomely eaten alive by his own ego -- the Police lost that tightly-wound, friction-fueled dynamic that made their early recordings so exciting. Sting went-on to be an ersatz male Sade, largely leaving Andy Summers and Stew Copeland to pursue significantly lower-profile careers. To hear them now, it's hard to believe they were once inescapably huge.
Striding up the avenues this morning, though -- I found myself furiously air-drumming along to manic tracks like "No Time This Time," "Can't Stand Losing," "Regatta de Blanc," the afore-mentioned "Driven to Tears," "Too Much Information" and even "Synchronicity I." Who cares if they weren't the coolest band in the world? They rocked. Case closed.
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