(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Sting)
Tue 24 March 2026 13:00, UK
While The Police were a widely celebrated act praised for the way in which they fused together elements of post-punk, pop and reggae, they’re also the recipients of a fair share of criticism.
One thing that irked people was their appropriation of what most considered to be music of Black origin, with a trio of white men being at the helm of not just a reggae-inspired band, but arguably having more critical and commercial success as a group than those who were producing this style of music authentically. It may not have troubled some people, and the fact that it was only an inspiration rather than their entire angle may have done them some favours in getting people to turn a blind eye towards it.
But at the same time, another reason why people took issue with The Police was the fact that they took themselves so seriously, and that there didn’t seem to be much of a sense of humour or self-awareness about them as a group.
The main culprit of this turned out to be Sting, whose self-serious attitude and perennial po-faced demeanour was a huge obstacle to some people being able to find any serious way of connecting with the band’s music. Not only did he do this within the band, but he showed even more signs of this in his subsequent solo career, becoming something of a parody of himself and displaying levels of arrogance that were hard to ignore.
This is something that many musicians fall foul of in their careers because of how invested they become in their art, and how they worry that they’ll devalue this by giving in to outside pressure and instead only playing by their own rules.
Bono is another prime example of this, with his attitude as the frontman of U2 and as a self-aggrandising figure who seems to think he has the capacity to change the world. Perhaps it’s a thing that comes with the territory of going by a mononym, given how both can be seen as these talented yet somewhat pompous figures who consider themselves to be superior to the rest of the world.
However, as far as Sting was concerned, there was one artist who took this sense of self-importance too far, and strangely enough, he also followed a similar naming convention to both Bono and Sting. In a 1985 interview with Playboy, he was asked for his opinion on funk rock prodigy Prince, and while he was full of praise for some aspects of his work, he expressed concerns that he was becoming far too arrogant for his own good.
“Prince is a great musician,” he confessed, “but I worry about him losing his sense of humor, about the deification syndrome in rock ‘n’ roll. I hate to see people trapping themselves in their own ivory towers. He’s said he’ll never tour again; to me, that’s death.”
At least Prince was able to get away with it by being a complete and utter genius, but then again, it’s not like others who fall into this category aren’t. They just don’t manage to carry it in the same way, and the entire persona that Prince developed for himself as this hyper-dramatic figure of rock and roll fit in with the music that he made, which never seemed to shy away from being dramatic.
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