Brand New Day: The world according to Sting
Brand New Day: The world according to Sting
By Devi M. Asmarani
JAKARTA (JP): He was born with a cool enough name, Gordon
Matthew Sumner, but he prefers to go by the monosyllabic Sting.
He was the bassist, lead singer and principal songwriter for
one of the world's most famous bands, The Police, but disbanded
it at the peak of its success in the 1980s.
He has come a long way from a restless, working-class Brit
with a shock of wild blond hair, to a modern renaissance man clad
in dark "trench-coatey" clothes, roaming the streets of Paris and
India and slipping deep into the ponderous and sagacious side of
himself.
His music gets more artsy, his lyrics more literary and he
proudly soars above his superficial pop and rock music peers. But
that is just one opinion.
More often, this born-again conviction is an object of scorn.
Since the Police days, Sting's skeptics see him turning into a
pompous songwriter and a pop star who takes himself too
seriously.
Even after having lost some of his old fan base, Sting has not
lost his edge. The fact that he is a virtual paradox may have
something to do with it.
After two decades in the music industry, he deserves credit
for creativity, unmatched authenticity and a strong sense of
identity, mixed with equally sharp commercial judgment that puts
his albums these days in the same racks as those of the Spice
Girls, instead of the less-scanned racks of obscure nonpopulist
musicians, in record stores.
Sting grows with his music. He is gallant and solitaire but
never a recluse in an industry that can be ruthless. His strong
musical drive leads to a restless crusade to create music that is
his by identity but never by style.
He ventures into the exotic (using ethnic and historical
references), simplicity (American country music) and enigmatic
rhythmical forays.
The same goes for Sting's lyrics. They are honest, sometimes
personal, sometimes expansive, but always communicative in the
traditional storytelling style.
In literature, Sting would represent the visceral humanism
with the pragmatic approach of short-story master Raymond Carver
and, at the same time, the imaginative and romantic sensibility
of early 19th century poets.
In his new album Brand New Day (A&M Records), these sweeping
traits were further refined by the matured musician.
Sting is not hesitant to cover the overrated subject of love
and all its excess baggage; most artists who take their arts
seriously know better than to mess around with the subject of
love. It tends to result in generalization, cliches or self-
indulgence.
In Sting's album, love is not treated as a sacred entity nor a
product of the fools. Love is boiled down into an inevitable
condition -- which could turn bad -- an affordable delicacy and a
crucial key to life's little secret spiced with compassionate
sense of humor.
With his core band (guitarist Dominic Miller, drummer Vinnie
Colaiuta and percussionist Manu Katche) as well as guest stars
Stevie Wonder (on harmonica), trumpeter Christ Botti, French
rapper Ste Strausz (aka Stephani Quinol), vocalist James Taylor
and his frequent guest jazzer Branford Marsalis on clarinet,
Sting coproduced with Kipper yet another excellent piece of work.
The album's opening song A thousand Years is a reflective and
moody number on a journey to reaffirm one's love. Its monotonous
melody and slothful but rich rhythm has a quaint quality blended
with the use of tranquil harmonizations.
The much acclaimed Desert Rose has the celebrated French-
Algerian vocalist Cheb Mami singing Arabic rai opposite Sting.
Proclaiming an opulent sexual longing, it gives a transcendental
arabesque sensation to a song filled with sensuous imagery: "This
dessert rose/Each of her veils, a secret promise/This desert
flower/No sweet perfume ever tortured me more than this".
A smart song worthy of notice is the Big Lie Small World. It
tells a story of a man who writes an I-never-felt-better letter
to his ex-lover, only to change his mind after it has been sent.
In his desperate efforts to get the mail back before it
reaches the intended recipient, the man ends up dealing with the
law. It is witty, sad, and eerily real. In an alienating airy
bossa nova, it feels like an excursion into the inside of an
Albert Camus' novel.
Sting's love is not the property of humans only. Perfect
Love... Gone wrong tells of a dog in a deep jealous funk over his
female owner's new lover.
This first person approach is also used in the smoky and
stringy Tomorrow We'll See, which is from a streetwalking gender-
bender's point of view, voicing a dreary but lucid passage: "They
say the first is the hardest trick/And after that it's just a
matter of logic" and "Don't judge me/You could be me in another
life/In another set of circumstances."
Like the songwriter himself, Fill Her Up is full of elements
of surprise. It starts out a country song -- a reminder of I'm So
Happy I Can't Stop Crying from the Mercury Falling album --
moving on to grave medieval plain song to rousing gospel choir,
before finally rounding out with a sprightly jazzy bit.
The title cut, Brand New Day reflects Sting's new look on
life: "Why we don't turn the clock to zero honey/ I'll sell the
stock we'll spend all the money/We're starting up a brand new
day."
Sting once said in an interview with Billboard magazine that
as he gets older, he is wiser and smarter, and yet not so sure
anymore. Perhaps the one thing he has come to is the full
assurance that the glass is now half-full.