The Police

During those halcyon days of college, way back in the Mesozoic, like most other kids I was into pop music, and The Police was one of my favorite bands. Along with Talking Heads and The Pretenders, they were the pillars of contemporary music for me at that time. When Roxanne became a hit and announced them to the scene, I was a senior in high school, drifting away from Top 40 radio, and they were one of the first "now" bands that caught my attention. Over their short history I bought all their records, but didn't have any of them on CD, so when I noticed there was a new two-disc retrospective I had to pick it up. I was heartened to learn that their music holds up quite nicely.

When they began, thirty years ago, they were a punk band with a reggae flavor. Outlandos D'Amour, their first record, is a chronicle of teenage angst, with some ridiculously delirious hooks. Most of the songs are about thwarted love, including Can't Stand Losing You, which has some terrific self-indulgent lyrics like, "This is our last goodbye, and you don't care, so I won't cry. You'll be sorry when I'm dead, and all this guilt will be on your head." What teenage boy hasn't thought the same thing at one point or another? It's interesting that this theme of the jilted lover would reappear five years later in their biggest smash, Every Breath You Take, the sinister stalker manifesto that would spend eight weeks at number one, only instead of an amped up punk number, it had a faux classical motif.

Listening to this retrospective, it's interesting to hear how they transformed themselves from angry punk band to mega-pop-stars. There second, third and fourth albums are full of sublime gems like Message in a Bottle (a marvel of pop construction), Don't Stand So Close to Me, De Do Do Do De Da Da Da, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic, Bring on the Night, and my personal favorite, Canary in a Coal Mine, which has an infectious riff while the lyrics read the riot act at a friend. Of course, these guys were also smarter than the average rock and roll star, and had songs of political import, like Invisible Sun, a haunting song about political prisoners. And how often does a band that becomes this big take album titles from works by Arthur Koestler and Karl Jung, and include rhymes for Nabokov and influenza?

Their last record, Synchronicity, was a tour de force, and remains one of my favorite records. In addition to Every Breath You Take, it included Synchronicity II, a magnificent composition that kicks out the jams while also juxtaposing the hell of modern life with a creature crawling out of the slime of a Scottish lake. I still love the ending: "Another working day has ended, only the rush hour hell to face. Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes, contestants in a suicidal race. Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance, he knows that something somewhere has to break. He sees the family home now, looming in his headlights, a pain upstairs that make his eyeballs ache."