January 29, 2003

The Very Best of Sting and the Police was released in the fall of 2002, which makes this review a bit overdue. But I spent a few minutes with the morning paper, and the news was, well, old (war, racism, environmental holocaust), and I had to vent. Which brings me to Sting (and his former band, the Police, and how about that for a name – pretty clever, is it not?), a guy who did his level best to make pop music an unpleasant place during the past 20 years.

Sting's music is the aural equivalent of one of those houses in which the kitchen is scrubbed so clean, it's like no one has ever cooked there. Except it's worse, because if Sting polished his own kitchen, he'd just be an anal-compulsive, or at worst a phobic, personality, like one of those housewives in a film like Safe who washes her hands over and over again to get them perfectly clean. But Sting is too busy being smart – sharing his insights into Jung with a reporter from Rolling Stone or being a spokesperson for political prisoners about to be executed by fascists in a third-world hellhole. So Sting has to hire a maid to clean his kitchen for him, and you know she better do it exactly right or she'll be fired in a hurry, minimum wage or no minimum wage.