Why The Police Is Jolly Good

This should come as a surprise to none of you, but I know how to rock. So by extension, I have a vast knowledge of exactly what does and does not rock. Therefore, today, in my generosity, I've decided to share some of that knowledge with all of you, my beloved and friendly readers. The last part of the Angel Food and Devil Dogs review is in the works, but until then, I think it'd be good if our collective sanity got a break. But in one fell swoop, we've had a massive hit to our IQ, self esteem, and faith in man's capacity to create beauty. What can we possibly do to combat it? I think it's time to bring out the most powerful weapon in my arsenal: THE EIGHTIES

Goodness gracious, where do I begin? Admittedly, the way I was raised probably gave me an unfair biased toward The Police. They seamlessly combined the two musical tastes my parents had; my Mom's deep-rooted nostalgia for the eighties, and my fathers love of a more "artistic" (nerdy) sort of rock. Both styles, depending on who you ask, have a seriously bad rep (because music, like everything else in the internet era, is SERIOUS BUSINESS). But The Police scoff this nonsense and not only embrace both, but do so with style.

How? I know you're going to be tempted to facepalm at this statement, but lot of it has to do with the fact that they're talent at both crafting music and writing lyrics. Good lyrics and a powerful vocal set balancing out mediocre music can really save a band (or vice versa). And with a lot of bands, sometimes you trip on music done so well that vocals become a none issue, or lyrics and vocals so powerful that you forget there's even music behind them. But for some reason, it's really hard for a lot of bands to be able to find the balance and strength needed in both.

So when you really trip on a band that's can check off both categories, it really feels like something of a rarity, almost to the point of being magical. When I listen to The Police, I don't feel like I'm listening to rock, nor do I feel like I'm listening to art. I feel like I'm listening to something completely different. Not that they don't have rockability though, perish the thought. You think your fingers were stinging when playing "Through the Fire and Flames" by Dragonforce in Guitar Hero? Let's see you play Landlord on Expert, Nancy.

I can really feel the effort that they put into every song they make, and I mean every song. The Police's work is very experimental, and they try to twist both their own style and the style of the music at the time at any opportunity they can. A lot of their early work is rock song after rock song after rock song, but after their hit "Roxanne", they really grew the beard and started playing around. I mean, just listen to Man in a Suitcase and then Invisible Sun. They don't even sound like they're from the same band.

Another thing I can really get behind is that they sing about a lot of different things. They're not just your love song/breakup song band. Not that they don't do love and breakup songs. In fact, they wrote my favorite breakup song ever.

Called you so many times today

And I guess it's all true what your girlfriends say

That you don't ever wanna see me again

And your brother's gonna kill me and he's six-feet-ten

Words to live by if I've ever heard them. But as I was saying, their songs cover a variety of topics, both seriously and humorously. They cover the obligatory big topics like world peace ("One World"), mass apathy ("Driven to Tears"), and depression ("Darkness"), but they also take on topics that don't come up as often, like media-based paranoia ("Canary in a Coal Mine"), a loss of direct human connection due to the onset of technology ("Someone To Talk To", and note that this was in the eighties before people were complaining about us dang kids and our eh-yai-emz), and not wanting no dead-end job ("[I Don't Want No] Dead End Job").

I will be the first to admit I am not the one to call when you need celebrity gossip, but I feel like the artists aren't just talented musicians, but are (or at least try to be) decent human beings. Part of this is that I do have a healthy respect for the lead singer, Sting, and not just because he can sing two octaves higher than I can. He's been involved in a lot of activism work, including his contributions to Amnesty International and founding the Rainforest Foundation Fund. He also remains one of the few rock stars in existence I can listen to in an interview and not want to punch in the face.

So naturally, having more than two working braincells does put you at a decided advantage when you need to write good music. All of The Police's lyrics are intelligent, ranging from witty and fun, to striking and painful. Even the way they construct the music itself has a degree of sophistication to it. I mean, listen to On Any Other Day. It's a song about a rotten day in sort of a bland life, and it has the snappy writing I love. But try to sing the chorus ("My wife has burned the scrambled eggs...") without musical accompaniment. The whole thing consists of only two notes, and you sound like you're singing while bored to tears. That's pretty damn clever.

But that's not even touching down on perhaps the one reason The Police may exist in this spectrum of reality. Easily their purpose in the cosmic plan is to create the greatest loud song in the history of loud songs. I'm not saying that it's a song that's inherently loud, it's just something that has to be played loud. It's like how ice cream has to be served cold, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show has to be watched within a crowd of heavily costumed freaks. Of course, the exact way to listen to this song is hooked up to a ten piece stereo system that's mounted between you and your window, with the brunt of the stereo system aimed at either your geriatric neighbor's dog or the nearest seismometer. Failing that, simply pumping it at max volume on your computron will do.

And I know this is a very link heavy post, but I insist that it's for your own benefit to listen to this song at the very least: Synchronicity II

Rumor has it that a Synchronicity III was in the works, but its production was forced to cancel because of divine intervention claiming copyright infringement on enlightenment.

And that is why The Police Is Jolly Good. Man, that's such an annoying title to me, because I want to write "Why The Police Are Jolly Good", but The Police is technically a singule subject even though its title refers to a plural number of subjects. It's things like this that keep an English Major up at night, when we're not dealing with why the world can't understand our brilliance and devising situations in our lives in which we can insert abstruse and barely relevant vocabulary to make ourselves sound more intelligent.

Thank you very much for reading as always, and we hope you too are walking on the moon.