In the original review of Reggatta de Blanc in Rolling Stone, Debra Rae Cohen wrote, “Sting's lilting mock-reggae wails-papier-màché plaintive though they may be-work like the siren of an emergency vehicle, guiding and warning of momentum. Also, please view this video and tell me whether it’s cheesy or awesome, I honestly can’t tell.Īs far as I can tell, the Police have always been received with some ambivalence-their corniness isn’t necessarily a quality they’ve acquired over time due to seeming outdated. Listening to this album, half of me wants to genuinely dance (though it’s impossible not to dance like a dad while listening to the Police - go ahead, try, I dare you), but the other half feels like it’s trapped in a slow-motion nineties dance montage, the kind where the camera rapidly zooms in and out on a strobe light (see, especially: “It’s Alright for You”). The title of this particular album, Reggatta de Blanc, is French for “white reggae,” which, aside from being problematic, is also just geeky. The Police’s cheesiness saturates even the smallest details.
I’m entering into that dangerous territory, here, of liking what my parents liked. The Police are still sort of cheesy, but the difference is now I’m starting to actively enjoy them. Sting is the same old Sting when I listen to him now on Reggatta de Blanc, but I’m startled by how good he sounds, even though I’ve been hearing him practically my whole life. The music equivalent of a Nilla wafer: perfectly fine, but would you ever champion it as a dessert? They were the background elevator noise, innocuous but faintly tacky, like seashell-patterned wallpaper at a beach house. It’s telling that, unlike most of the bands I listened to incessantly, the Police are a vehicle for memories that have nothing to do with the Police they were just always there.
#Reggatta de blanc how to#
The Police seemed ubiquitous on the radio back then, maybe because my mother was my chauffeur to and from school and skating practice, and we clocked at least ten hours in the car each week listening to MIX 107.3 (tagline: “A mix of the seventies, eighties, nineties, and TODAY ”), which kept the Police on heavy rotation, so that now, whenever I hear Sting’s cottony croon, I’m returned to that safe and timeless place of the passenger’s seat before I knew how to drive, the view out the window still limitless, a frame for where I knew someday out there the rest of my life would happen.
So much of my mother I know from the sounds of the ways in which she escaped into herself: the whirr of her sewing machine from the basement as she pieced together a quilt, the scratch of a stalk of charcoal as she drew in her sketchbook.
#Reggatta de blanc tv#
He’s a yoga master.” My mother had become, in my adolescence, devoted to yoga, and in the evenings after work, you could hear her practice in the TV room, even with the door closed, her breath whooshing with control and concentration. What I knew of the Police began and ended with their singles, Moulin Rouge ’s adaptation of “Roxanne,” and the fact that my mom loved Sting partly because he was a “yoga master,” which is what she told me each time the Police got airplay or came up in conversation: “Oh, I like Sting.
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