The Irish writer Brendan Behan once said, “I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.” That’s the way I feel about the English band The Police, and their every bit as pretentious as Bono frontman Sting. If I were to find myself with my head through the shattered windshield of my demolished automobile and one of The Police’s reggae-influenced new wave songs were to come on the car radio I would say, “Oh, come on God! “Roxanne?” Am I really that terrible a person?”
When Sting decided to Garfunkel trio mates Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers at the peak of the band’s success in 1986, I might have heaved a sigh of relief. But a little warning bell in my head told me that Sting’s departure from The Police because he felt artistically constrained by the band’s pop rock style of music boded ill. I couldn’t escape the suspicion that the King of Pain was out to prove to the world that he was more than just the guy who gave us “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.” No, he was a musical artiste set on making grand artistic statements, and he didn’t care who got hurt.
Which is just what he did with his 1986 debut album The Dream of the Blue Turtles. You can tell he’s aiming high because the LP is jam-packed with songs about big societal issues and has a slick jazz veneer. Because, you know, jazz is a more sophisticated musical form than rock, and indulging your jazz itch automatically makes you a classier person.
The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, never one to suffer fools gladly, had this to say about Sting’s debut: “Displacing the Police’s sere dynamics we have bathtubs full of demijazz, drenching this self-aggrandizing and no doubt hitbound project in a whole new dimension of phony class.” That about sums it up. When it comes to rock, jazz is often the last refuge of a scoundrel. It may even be the first.
Unfortunately there’s no saving the highfalutin from themselves, and such is the case with The Dream of the Blue Turtles. To realize his artistic vision Sting corralled ubiquitous jazz saxophonist/clarinetist Branford Marsalis and such fellow travelers as pianist/keyboardist Kenny Kirkland, bassist Darryl Jones, and drummer Omar Hakim–everybody knows you can’t make a self-important statement with punks.
Gone, for the most part, is the catchy pop directness and relative simplicity of songs like “Roxanne,” “Every Breathe You Take,” and “Every Little Thing She Does.” What you get in its place is impeccably tasteful but anything but galvanizing rock with a jazz overlay. The results are somber, oh so terribly serious and dull. You would have to baste The Dream of the Blue Turtles in pure adrenaline to give it any rock punch, but punch isn’t on Sting’s agenda.
The album basically marks Sting’s retirement from the rock biz. This is chamber music, and you’re not supposed to get off on it. It’s there to be admired. Or perhaps I should say it’s there because Sting wants to be admired, and not as a mere writer of infectious pop songs. Unfortunately his ambition exceeds his reach, and what we’re left with is the lingering stink that accompanies an artist’s desperate desire to be taken very, very seriously.
Opening track “If You Love Somebody Set You Free” is as close as The Dream of the Blue Turtles gets to a straight-up pop song. I like the way it sounds like it was recorded at the very back of an airplane hangar, and the jazz trappings work. But the subject matter could hardly be more hackneyed—I’m pretty sure he stole that title from a Hallmark card. As Robert Christgau noted in his review of the album, “Not since Paul Simon’s dangling conversations has a pop hero made such a beeline for the middlebrow cliché.”
The tropical flavoring of follow-up “Love Is the Seventh Wave” is a middlebrow cliche in and of itself, and Sting sounds like he just attended a Paul Simon symposium on cultural musical appropriation. And the song reeks of spiritual condescension. Sings Sting, “There is a deeper world than this, that you don’t understand.” I don’t think we need wonder whether Sting understands—he has depths that we lack. That said, I like the way he tosses in a refrain of “Every Breath You Take” at song’s end.
“Russians” has a “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” vibe to it and is an anti-nuclear war song the lyrics of which are risible—Sting may or may not be a smart guy, but his skills don’t run to political commentary. The musical setting is pompous, and what we get from Sting are embarrassing doggerel along the lines of “We share the same biology/Regardless of ideology/Believe me when I say to you/I hope the Russians love their children too.” He hopes? Is there a part of Sting that actually believes that Russians might hate their kids? And don’t even get me started on the lines, “Mr. Khrushchev said, “We will bury you”/I don’t subscribe to this point of view.” They’re breathtaking in their banality, and what amazes me most is this song was actually released as a single.
“Children’s Crusade” is a portentous slow one with jazz trappings on which Sting takes us back to the wanton slaughter of young English lads at the beginning of the first World War before conflating their pointless sacrifice with the death of England’s youth in our time at the hands of opiates. Sting makes much of the fact that the same poppies used as remembrance symbols during the war to end all wars are the same poppies used to produce heroin, and it’s a clever enough conceit. But the song itself is a bombastic bummer and drags itself along like a gut-shot soldier on his belly making his slow and painful way across No Man’s Land in Ypres, France. Fun level: zero. But Sting isn’t in the fun business. I would say he’d retired from the fun business when he quit The Police, but he was a deadly serious git back then as well.
“Shadows in the Rain” is a welcome upbeat number, and Sting sounds refreshingly animated—excitable even. It’s a do-over of the mid-tempo reggae rock bore released by The Police in 1980, and it’s a definite improvement. Sting has more grit in his voice, and the song has a more textured feel. More jump too. All it lacks is Andy Summers’ superb guitar work at the close of the original.
On follow-up “Working the Black Seam” Sting, who obviously wants to be known as the most socially conscious rocker of his generation, throws his support behind the coal miners who were then on strike in Thatcher’s England. But the song has problems. Vocally Sting seems to be aiming for Gregorian chant, and the song’s sanctimonious feel is exceeded only by Sting’s stilted lyrics and woeful ignorance of basic science. Lines like “Power was to become cheap and clean/Grimy faces were never seen/Deadly for 12,000 years/Is carbon 14” are the stuff of limericks, not poetry, and our guy obviously doesn’t know diddly-squat about carbon 14.
“Consider Me Gone” is built on a sustained organ riff that swings, but doesn’t swing so much that you’ll want to get up off your ass and do the jump and jive. It’s far too sedate, Sting’s vocals included, and it’s followed by the title track, which is a jazzbo’s dream. Basically Sting gave the jazz guys the opportunity to cut loose and play some bebop, and pianist Kenny Kirkland in particular delivers—he tickles the ivories like Bud Powell. It’s short and sweet and not half bad but I get the idea that it’s only on the album to demonstrate how utterly hip Sting is, hanging with actual jazz musicians and all. Call it a classic case of Joni Mitchell syndrome.
The title track is a relatively incongruous but painless interlude, but painless is not a word I would use to describe “The Moon Over Bourbon Street.” How to describe it? As a jazzy Broadway show tune equipped with incongruously neo-classical strings over which Sting (who plays double bass, because, you know, it’s hep) croons like he has a fedora dipped over one eye while Marsalis provides a running commentary on horn? It’s bogus French Quarter atmosphere was evidently inspired by Sting’s deep reading of Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, and if there’s a lesson to be learned here it’s that writers should be more careful because they never know what horrors their words may unleash upon the world.
Finally we have “Fortress Around Your Heart,” the lyrics of which also fall into the realm of middlebrow cliche. But along with “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free” it’s a close to pop as you’ll find on The Dream of the Blue Turtles. It’s a bit too regal for my tastes but boasts an actual rock beat, and Marsalis’ horn blandishments work.
Sting’s the kind of guy whose philosophy runs towards the sentiments on greeting cards. He says things like “Let your soul be your pilot” and “You have to be yourself. Stay true to who and what you are. And if people still like you, that’s great! If they don’t, that’s their problem.” In short, he’s talented but dim. The problem is he isn’t as talented as he thinks he is, and his big statements come across as dim indeed. Pop music is beneath him, probably always was, and that’s too bad because while I was never a fan of The Police there’s no gainsaying the fact that with them Sting produced more than his fair share of pop hits. That fact that he continued to produce hits post-Police I find staggering. I also find it demoralizing, as I do any demonstration that pomposity pays.
Sting was always a stodgy member of the bourgeoisie—it goes the whole way back to his prim attempt to save Roxanne from her nefarious trade. But he got worse. As did his music, which falls into the realm of the middlebrow avant-garde. But what can you do? Sting is a very serious man. And he cares. Which is wonderful. I simply don’t understand why I should have to suffer for it.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D+
