The Best Of Sting And The Police Views

Music

Though the band released only three studio albums within the decade, new wave pop superstars the Police sported an impressively high percentage of quality tracks, especially when compared to many of their '80s contemporaries who could barely muster three strong tunes on a 10-song LP. As a result, distilling the band's best work into a tidy Top 10 list is more difficult than it has any right to be, given the painfully short life span of the Police. Alas, we can only imagine what could have been, but at least we got those three albums and the impeccable songwriting and instrumentalism from Sting & Co.

This is arguably the first undisputed classic Police tune, from the immeasurably talented pen of primary songwriter Sting. As is typical of that artist's compositions, the song weaves an incredibly dense narrative full of literary heft and panache. Both thematically and atmospherically, it's the pop music equivalent of high art. The Nabokov connection is obvious but not tired, and the dazzling guitar work from Andy Summers and percussive wizardry of Stewart Copeland's drumming provide so many welcome layers. This is one of the most famous classic rock staples to come from the Police, and saturated airplay has not dulled its effects.

It's always been rather the easy way out to label the Police as a mixture of rock, pop and reggae, but the truth is the band always had its own unique take on each of those forms that superseded such labels. This great, nervous ditty about alienation is a perfect example of the singular style the Police introduced and nearly copyrighted in the early '80s. Sting spits out provocative but often opaque lyrics in an almost hip-hop stream, and the band cooks like no other before or after.

As much as its nonsense title seems to suggest that Sting has turned away from his literary, sometimes esoteric songwriting impulses in this song that celebrates the limitations of language, he betrays that concept playfully and delightfully in this, one of his most interesting lyrics. As usual, the hooks are big and bountiful, but what really makes the song resonate is Sting's uncanny ability to get away with describing words as cheques left unsigned from the banks of chaos in his mind. Only a special rank of wordsmith can make that work.