Only the Good Die Jung

Considering the inescapable enormity of The Police at their height, it’s astonishing in retrospect how subtle they were (and not just in comparison to the overall garishness of the Reagan years). First, of course, in the music. The songs of Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland were indeed gloriously precise, both in how they subverted pop/rock tropes and in how deftly they utilized global sounds (in describing the Police’s rhythms, the suffix “-tinged” gets thrown around a lot). And, this precision, the musicians—a platonic throuple of bookish/baddish boys, splitting the difference between the modish Jam and model-ish Duran Duran while exhibiting their own distinct glamor—bridged the gap between the muso rock of the ‘70s (minus the bombast) and image-obsessed pop rocks of the ‘80s (minus the, you know, anti-intellectualism and spirit crushing shallowness), and they did so even in the context of sold out stadiums.

But the Police’s appealing absence of bombast lies not just in what fans heard on the radio and saw on MTV. Even the mythology around the recording of Synchronicity (Fighting! Marital strife! An album with its title seemingly tailor made to be repeatedly shoehorned into the band’s inevitable episode of Behind The Music!) is endearingly un-mythic. Yes, much of the tension was derived from ego, inter-band power struggles, and Sting finding himself more famous than Jesus (if he’d been in the Beatles). But how that strife expressed itself—sniping, sniping, and more sniping—should be familiar to anyone who’s had a job. In every prosaic life situation, there’s a Sting (or someone who thinks they’re Sting), a Stewart Copeland (who was the Sting of his own life before Sting showed up), and an Andy Summer, who’s as good as anyone can be at their job, but who also won’t shut up about their mother. The fact that Sting started writing “Every Breath You Take” at Ian Fleming’s former estate (then owned by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell) is a bit atypical of a breakroom squabble. But if you imagine Sting plonking away at his piano, in the house that James Bond built, as the frontman passive aggressively snatching clout from Stewart Copeland’s dad being in the CIA, it all comes down to relatable earth. Some people get their jabs in at the office supply wholesale company. Some people get their jabs in while making a transformative sophisto-pop masterpiece.

(Before we go any further, it should be noted that, here at CREEM, we dig both “Mother” and “Miss Gradenko,” and we don’t care who knows it. In fact, we think Copeland’s “Gradenko” earns its place on the album on XTC-doing-Moscow On The Hudson merits alone and, along those lines, we wish Andy Summers would stop hedging on his Beefheartian gas-up’s worth. As if a Woody Allen/Nick Cave hybrid with an orientalist-surf guitar line needs justifying!)

In influence too, the Police were subtle. While, their American debut at CBGBs and bleached hair aside, the Police were entirely (and gleefully) disattached from punk, that doesn’t mean they were counterrevolutionary to the punk/post-punk project. If the band embraced synth tech a bit more pragmatically than their avant-pop peers like Gabriel, Bush et al (despite Copeland’s shared fondness for the Fairlight and Sting grokking the Oberheim DSX enough to name all his drum machines “Dennis”), the result was a use of technology as tactical as the band’s earlier use of reggae. A bit of approximated marimba, like lil’ baby dinosaur feet on “Walking In Your Footsteps.” A touch of synth on Synchronicity’s two title tracks. Nothing too ostentatious, but enough to give a song some forward-thinking sizzle.

Of course, the one area where the Police were not subtle was in how Sting reveled in the most outsized passions, and in how the band refused to dumb their conveyance of even the most primal of those passions down. If anything, the intelligence with which the Police expressed the lizard brain is a contradiction which, if perhaps a bit more common in the solipsistic ‘70s, has been rarely matched on or off the pop charts since. Outside of a few of the more caustic pop stars (with Harry Nilsson as an example of proto-Sting and the rapper Future as Sting A.D.) it’s difficult to imagine some of the Police’s harder emotional vibes resting as neatly in popular song. (Some of Sting’s particularly squirmy thoughts now feel both absurd and prescient. In this age of social media, it may also be difficult to believe that there was a full twenty-five years—from the publication of Lolita in 1955 to the 1980 release of the Police’s smash hit, “Don’t Stand So Close To Me”—when you had to actually read a book in order to have an opinion on Nabakov).

Synchronicity is where the band perfects making dark nights of the soul seem positively beachy. If the first “Synchronicity” of the album shows the band doing their level best to continue the zen knowingness of Ghost In The Machine, that boisterous acceptance doesn’t last. By the second of the title tracks, the only connections possible are between the protagonist’s brats chewing their breakfast cereal with the same ill-fated gusto as the Loch Ness monster chews its watery cud. Elsewhere, on “King of Pain,” Sting depicts his soul as a black stain bopping through an entire itinerary of grievance like one of those globe trotting garden gnomes, with the nearest star being just the first stop. On “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” the Police pretty much describe the plot of Doctor Strange, with Baron Mordo as the hero. And, of course, there’s “Every Breath You Take.” With jazz chords and the slyest of time signatures, any and all betrayals, obsessions, and dreams of inverted power dynamics shine throughout the entire album. Even the Police have expressed bemused surprise at their odes to toxicity being danced to at every single wedding ceremony for the next forty years.

(There’s also the dinosaur song. In a tone as sweet as pie, Sting tells Mr. Dinosaur that he was God’s favorite, but oh well. Like the jazz police described by Leonard Cohen a few years later, Sting and Co. are mad for turtle meat.)

And that’s the perverse joy of Synchronicity; just how at odds it is, even with itself. An album made by three men who shared a deep (if intermittent) love, while not being able to stand the sight of each other. Three egos able to sublimate to one (while bullying back enough to get the two most bonkers tracks on the final mix). Ugly emotions conveyed by angelic timbre and cheekbones that the devil would kill for. Complex songwriting, made catchy through adroit playing as much as by a knack for hitmaking, performed with an ease—which makes a trio sound like a seven piece—that baffles the ear and brain to the point where it’s received as yumilicious bubblegum. Songs about bearing the brunt of ineffable suffering and destroying the ones you love like it’s a job, which would then get played on the job till the end of time, making work almost bearable for millions.