Mendelsohn: The one thing I miss about working through the Great List in numerical order was the weekly marching orders. Don’t like the album? Too bad. Don’t know anything about? Better learn. I kind of miss the adventure of exploring music I wasn’t familiar with. So, while perusing the Great List, trying to make sense of albums that came out in the early 1980s, I noticed the Police’s Synchronicity sitting at no. 272 overall and holding down the no. 3 spot for the year 1983 (R.E.M.’s Mumur is no. 1, Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones is no. 2 and the Violent Femmes self-titled debut is no. 4, which — spoiler alert, we are going to be talking about in a couple of weeks). I don’t know anything about the Police, at least anything I wasn’t taught by their singles, and my first experience with Sting was seeing him play the role of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in the critical wasteland that is the 1984 science fiction bomb, Dune.
So why not give it go? I am not disappointed. I thought I’d be parsing a record full of pop/rock tracks that walked the line between punk and reggae. What I find is a full-blown, jazz fusion blow out of a concept album. By now, you are probably wondering, “Mendelsohn why haven’t you listened to any Police? They were the biggest band in the world for the first part of the ’80s.” Two words: Sean Combs (AKA Puffy Daddy, P Diddy, or P Poppa, Poppa Diddy Pop, whatever he calls himself these days). Coming of age in the 1990s I got to listen to Mr. Combs lament the loss of his friend, the Notorious B.I.G., on “I’ll Be Missing You”, which sampled “Every Breath You Take”, and was played non-stop for all of 1997. That soured any curiosity I had about the band.
Any comment, Klinger? Pick it up wherever; the Police changing gears to make a spectacular record; Mr. Combs making Mr. Sting even more rich; or the fact that everything I know about rock music I learned from terrible sci-fi movies (if you weren’t keeping track, that is now three rock stars I’ve met that way — the first two being Mick Jagger in Freejack and David Bowie in Labyrinth).
Klinger: This is a lot to unpack, Mendelsohn. First of all, your parents should have monitored your TV watching far more closely. Second of all, it’s completely unfathomable to me that you aren’t familiar with the Police in general and Synchronicity in particular. I realize you were like one years old when this album came out, but this album was so ubiquitous that I can’t believe they weren’t drilled into the skulls of every single sentient being in the developed world. On the other hand, I was in high school and at that moment, the Police were one of the bands that more or less everybody seemed to like. A couple of them were cute enough for the girls (sorry, Andy Summers), they had enough New Wave cred for the hipsters, and your mainstream rock guys appreciated the fact that they didn’t look like Kajagoogoo. The only other group to fall into this sweet spot was the Cars, and they miss out because the girls all had to look past Ric Ocasek.
At any rate, because of its ubiquity, I had generally given Synchronicity short shrift, figuring it was more of a super-safe VH1 pick and thus less preferable to their predecessors. But once you get past the candle-kicking “Wrapped Around Your Finger” and they terribly overplayed “Every Breath You Take” (Yes, I know it’s actually creepy and not a love song. Stop telling me that.), this is an adventurous, sonically powerful record. Although I do take issue with your notion that it’s a changing of gears — I’d argue that it’s more of an extension of the previous Ghost in the Machine, but you might not realize that since you let Po Doodly rob you of your ability to enjoy the Police. I’m also not sure if this counts as a concept album, but maybe you’ve uncovered something in your recent digging in. Care to elaborate?
Mendelsohn: I don’t know anything about the Police. That’s why we are listening to this album (and apparently I need to listen to the rest of them as well).
After a crash course through the earlier part of their catalog and another hour with Ghost in the Machine, it’s obvious that most of their songs were indeed about prostitutes or stalkers and sonically, they were heading toward something greater than the reggae- and punk-influenced rock that made them New Wave stars. But while the Police maintain a consistent sound throughout their career, Synchronicity seems to offer a new direction as they dropped the reggae in favor of synthesizers, worldbeat, and the complexity of jazz fusion. Even going from Ghost in the Machine to Synchronicity seems worlds away. The band or Sting — I’m not sure which — manages to take the music to a new level, pushing soundscapes and big ideas through the lens of pop music with a stylistic and modern approach that indicates a band consciously looking for something more.
Maybe I should have said “conceptual”, because the more I try to pick out an overarching theme, the less cohesively it seems thematically. Unless you consider Sting writing some of his best music of his career, while his two bandmates take a back seat, to constitute a concept album. Or we could point to Sting’s interest in Carl Jung’s theory of Synchronicity and the collective unconsciousness. The collective unconsciousness, or a belief in monopsychism, is a tenet of Rastafarianism. The growth and spread of the Rastafarian movement coincided with the rise of reggae, one of the main building blocks in the Police’s earlier sound despite the fact that Synchronicity is almost completely devoid of the early reggae inflection (except for a little bit of guitar in “Wrapped Around Your Finger”). And now I’m stuck with a bunch of loose strings I can’t seem to tie together. What have I gotten myself into?
Klinger: Wow, this record’s done knocked you for a philosophical loop. I encourage that. And maybe it’s my own tendency to think of Synchronicity as a mega-hit blockbuster of an album that keeps me from analyzing it in that way. Half the songs on here received near-constant radio play (again, sorry Andy Summers, although your quirky 12-bar blues/Middle Eastern/crazy man ranting “Mother” is a delight), and all of them made the top 20. The ’80s were a time for these massive hit albums, from Thriller to Sports, and the singles from Synchronicity kept it in the consciousness for nearly a solid year.
It also may be my tendency to notice some of Sting’s dodgier lyrical moments. There are plenty of times when he’s really on — “Synchronicity II” is quite nearly perfect in its depiction of a suburban father’s dead-eyed meandering through life and how close that edges toward psychosis (Not that I’d know anything about that! Hi, Honey!). It’s a shame that the video squandered an opportunity to drive that point home and instead presented the three of them capering about in a Mad Max-style junkyard or whatever. Regardless, there are also quite moments where he just doesn’t stick the landing lyrically. I cringed a bit a couple of times during “Murder by Numbers”, for example (“…and anyone else you find a bore…”). And Sting’s propensity toward making vaguely annoying academic references (“Scylla and Charybdis”) can be grating. But maybe I’m just nitpicking because mocking Sting became de rigeur among rock nerds once the Police broke up and his MOR jazz sensibilities took hold. Maybe I’m just jealous because most of the women I liked in college had his picture hanging up in their dorm rooms. I can be petty like that sometimes.
Mendelsohn: That’s understandable. Anytime Sting is brought up in conversation, I immediately think about him in Dune, wearing a leather speedo and dripping sweat after emerging from some futuristic sauna. I’m never going to be able to wear a speedo without comparing myself to him thanks to a movie I saw on broadcast TV one Saturday afternoon when I was eight years old. We all have our own issues with Sting, man.
Klinger: Yours appear to run deeper than most, though.
Mendelsohn: I think the biggest difference between the way we each view this record is the frame of reference. Without the pop culture baggage, I get to see Synchronicity as a progressive pop album that explores some heavy philosophical issues as the Police try to distill the essence of the human condition into four-minute blasts of rock ‘n’ roll. Granted, Synchronicity can be a little overbearing — and as one pot calling the other kettle black — Sting’s prodigious use of ten-cent words gets really old really fast. And who writes an album about Jungian archetypes? It’s a good think Sting is handsome; that shit would not fly coming out of Steve Perry’s mouth. Regardless, the Police managed to transform themselves from a simple rock outfit to the biggest band in the world for a short time thanks to some very forward thinking. I don’t think it would be such a bad thing to see more bands strive to follow in footsteps of the Police.