Sting, re-assessed. - By Stephen Metcalf - Slate Magazine

Once an angry punk, always an angry punk ...

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"Fucking horrible man," Paul Weller, late of the Jam and the Style Council, once fulminated about him. "No edge, no attitude, no nothing." Bob Geldof, ostensibly a friend, has labeled him a "Geordie twat." Unkindness accrues easily to Gordon Matthew Sumner, the musician, actor, activist, and memoirist better known as Sting. Unfairly? Let's say not wholly uninvited. Why, for instance, would someone who came of musical age in the punk era, alongside acts that aspired to take the piss out of absolutely everything, work so tirelessly to put the piss back in? "At this moment," Sting mooned in his autobiography, Broken Music (2003), about a flower he espied on the Amazon floor, "I am led to an understanding that not only must such tiny, beautiful and delicate living things be charged with love, but also the inanimate stones that surround them, everything giving and receiving, reflecting and absorbing, resisting and yielding." Sermons in stones, ghosts in machines, Lite FM in a burgundy turtleneck—it commands a kind of silent awe. And it raises anew the ancient riddle: How could a Geordie twat like Sting have fronted a band as great as the Police?

Sting, re-assessed. - By Stephen Metcalf - Slate Magazine