Credit: LastFM
The entire musical journey Sting has gone on wasn’t about trying to find one singular sound.
He liked the idea of moving around and trying out new spaces within his own voice and with different players, and while everyone clamoured to have a massive Police reunion, Sting wasn’t about to sacrifice his artistry to mine everyone else’s nostalgia. He wanted to be his own artist, but that also meant taking more than a few jabs from critics who didn’t understand what he was going for all the time.
While a lot of Sting’s material was a lot more mature than that of the average rock and roll star, some listeners didn’t quite know what he was going for when he first went solo. The Dream of the Blue Turtles definitely had a lot more interesting songs than the more forgettable pieces of The Police’s discography, but the idea of him going immediately into jazzy territory wasn’t going to satisfy the people who had known him for singing ‘Roxanne’ back in the day.
It was definitely a tough pill for some to swallow, but Sting didn’t see his music as being about one type of music in particular. He wanted the opportunity to stretch things out, and even though the world wasn’t ready for him working in this kind of space, he always approached these kinds of tunes as a new opportunity. And when he eventually got out of the jazz world, he wanted to see what other branches of music that the world had to offer whenever he picked up his guitar again.
In fact, what he was doing wasn’t all that dissimilar from what someone like Paul Simon had done years before him. There was so much more to explore than the average rock and roll song, and since Sting never claimed to be a rock and roll purist, he wanted to sample a little bit of everything, even if it didn’t align with the traditional Western styles of music. But that means dealing with one phrase that he could never handle: world music.
While that moniker normally goes to the more eccentric albums that people sell in the coffee shop circuit, Sting didn’t use his music as that kind of passive listening experience. He was trying his best to make the music that most of his audience hadn’t heard of yet, and even though he liked the idea of getting sounds from different parts of the world, he didn’t want to be defined by another random genre thrown on top of him.
It was okay for him to like all kinds of music, but the idea of world music as a whole felt regressive when he was put in that category, saying, “I think labels are very unhelpful in music. I never liked that term ‘world music.’ I mean, what is music other than from this world? But that eclecticism is something that I am certainly inspired by. Music is a common language and the building blocks are the same. [That’s] something that has become world music, [but] I don’t like that term.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And when you listen to the way that he reinterprets a lot of his material, you can hear why it would get to be bothersome to him after a while. The idea of having any number of his songs put into unique little boxes was always going to limit where he could go, and even some of his colleagues, like Don Henley, eventually had the same problem when some of their favourite Americana music began getting put in certain categories that didn’t appeal to anyone.
Sure, Sting did have more than a few moments where he felt like he was flirting with music that was from other parts of the world, but there was no reason for him to call himself a pioneer of a new genre or anything. World music was yet another ‘new age’ term to him, and the best that he could hope for was to make music that he could be proud of when listening back to it in a couple of years.
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