The Police and the 30th Anniversary of Their Swansong, "Synchronicity"

One Special Album Made all the Difference: Reflections on The Police's 1983 "Synchronicity" album

by James Albert Barr

"I have only come here seeking knowledge, things they would not teach me of in college."
                                             -  The Police: "Wrapped Around Your Finger" (lyrics by Sting)

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the final studio album by The Police, "Synchronicity". As anniversaries go this one is pretty significant to me personally. I had only turned fifteen years old a few weeks before this monumentally important album's official release on June 17, 1983. In the month prior to the album's ubiquitous appearance in music shops and retail stores, like Zellers, where I purchased my copy for $6.99 plus tax, the album's first single came out. It was entitled "Every Breath You Take".

I can still remember how utterly blown away I was when I first heard it; that classic, commencing bang from Stewart Copeland's drum that immediately set the dark tone of this incredible song, followed by Andy Summers' arresting guitar melody suffusing the song with an ominous, billowing fog, which, coupled with Sting's steady bass-line, I feel completely warranted the memorable black and white video that accompanied it, giving it a film noir quality, especially as it featured a lit cigarette at the beginning and end. Kevin Godley and Lol Crème of 10cc fame directed the "Every Breath You Take" video (along with the videos for "Synchronicity II" and "Wrapped Around Your Finger" as well), and MTV incessantly aired it from then on that May and throughout the rest of the year pretty much. It also dominated radio airplay and 45-single sales by spending 8 consecutive weeks at #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart in July and August of '83.

Sting's vocals on the track were uncharacteristically in a low-register, which lent a menacing vibe, given the stalker-theme elicited in the fairly simple lyrics that begin with: "Every breath you take/ Every move you make/ Every bond you break/Every step you take/ I'll be watching you". Many people, particularly unwitting brides and grooms, misinterpreted "Every Breath You Take" as a love-song in the traditional sense, but it's anything but. The song seems to be about a jilted man who's the unfortunate recipient of unrequited love, and has become obsessed with his distant "object of desire". 

However, Sting has intriguingly claimed in a recent interview that the smash-hit song is about the Reagan administration and the conservative political climate of the 80s, with the notion of Big Brother "watching you, and watching us all": "1984", after all, was the title of George Orwell's nightmarish 1949 novel, fittingly enough, so perhaps Sting was, consciously or unconsciously, channelling that novel, as well as his marriage break-up with his first wife, Frances Tomelty, when he composed "Every Breath You Take". Was there possibly a synchronous relationship between said political climate of that time and the deep, personal romantic turmoil Sting was going through concurrently?

Regardless, I bought the 45-single of it in May of '83, and fervently played it to death, if for no other reason than because I absolutely loved its seductive melody and hook and overall mood, while still being intrigued by its sinister overtones. Even as a young teenage boy, I was readily drawn to the strange, mysterious and dark under-currents of the world around me. No wonder David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" is one of my all-time favorite films! There's a definite part of me that profoundly relates to the film's small-town protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont, and his irrepressible sense of curiosity and inquisitiveness, whatever the risks and dangers such investigating may entail. Ironically, I seemed to have had cultivated a Faustian taste for "forbidden knowledge" and the truth, however unsettling, about the real state of things.

When June came around, and I saw "Synchronicity" displayed, with all the other new records out at the time, I snatched up a precious copy with my own money that I had earned delivering newspapers with my brother, Jeff. Excitedly bringing the album home, without having heard any of the other tracks, besides "Every Breath You Take", I seem to recall just knowing beforehand, in my mind, that the album was going to be amazing, and IT WAS! The music (side one is the rockier, up-tempo half, and side two is the more subdued, slow-tempo half), melodies, hooks, vocals, production, and each band member's respective instrumental contribution captivated and enchanted my every faculty and sense, which, for a freshly pubescent fifteen year-old boy, were hyper-sensitive and sharply attuned. It was a watershed moment for me when I first heard "Synchronicity" in its entirety. I had never heard anything like it before. It was so different to what I was used to hearing on the radio, despite its accessibility. However, the lyrics were a different story altogether, at least on a conscious, and naïve, level.

First of all, I thought to myself back then, while going to junior high school at the time, "what did synchronicity mean exactly"? And as I eagerly followed along with the lyrics printed on the album sleeve, I also asked myself what did "Spiritus Mundi" mean? And what did Sting mean when he sang "Take this space between us and fill it up someway"? What the hell was Andy ranting and raving on about his mother? Who was "Miss Gradenko"? What did the Loch Ness Monster have to do with suburban families and city life? Why all the vivid negative imagery to express that you're in pain? What was the Scylla and Charibdes? Who was Mephistopheles? And, finally, who were these strange sisters wandering in the Sahara Desert looking for tea? Some of the answers to these teeming questions were thankfully provided by The Police members themselves in the many interviews I came across in the rock music magazines I started to buy in conjunction with my burgeoning love and obsession with pop-music and Top 40 radio circa '82-'83.

For such a dark and dour, intelligent and literary album, "Synchronicity" became a huge commercial hit, spending 17 non-consecutive weeks at #1 on Billboard's Top 200, even keeping Michael Jackson's juggernaut hit album, "Thriller", off the top-spot for most of the summer and fall, as it went on to achieve multi-platinum status with staggering sales of over 8 million copies in the U.S. alone. It also scored three more hit singles: "King of Pain" (#3 chart placing), "Wrapped Around Your Finger" (#8), and "Synchronicity II" (#16). Clearly, the album struck a lot more chords than just mine in 1983.

Eventually, I learned that synchronicity was a concept developed by famed psychologist, Carl Jung, which meant the profound connection between two seemingly unrelated things; and that Spiritus Mundi meant "World spirit, or spirit of man"; the "space between us" is apparently the widening gap within a humanity that has distanced itself from its former god, or gods, and are collectively feeling spiritually empty for it; the rocky relationship between Andy's character and his mother is clearly a depiction of Freud's well-known "Oedipus complex"; "Miss Gradenko" alluded to foreign relations with the Soviet Union during a time when nuclear devastation was on everyone's mind; the Loch Ness Monster was used as a metaphor for the darkness humanity had apparently unleashed from within itself, because of the increasing inhumanity brought on by an alienated modernity (there was also an allusion to William Butler Yeats' famous 1920 poem "The Second Coming"); the hyperbolic, yet poetic imagery, Sting described in "King of Pain" were all analogies to the monumental "pain and turmoil" (which he admitted in interviews around that time in '83 produced his best work) he had seemingly been enduring exclusively; the Scylla is a massive rock formation resembling a many-headed sea-beast, while the Charibdes is a gigantic whirlpool, and both were featured in Homer's "The Odyssey"; Mephistopheles is the personification of the devil that appeared in Goethe's early 19th century masterpiece, "Faust"; and, finally, the sisters in the Sahara Desert appeared as a symbolic anecdote in Paul Bowles' marvelous 1949 novel, "The Sheltering Sky", which Sting had read and was obviously inspired to write "Tea in the Sahara", the mesmerizing album closer on the vinyl version of "Synchronicity", where as the politically-acerbic "Murder by Numbers" is/was the featured album closer on the compact disc and tape cassette.

It's funny though, despite not being privy to all the literary and philosophical references peppered throughout "Synchronicity's" lyrics, and not fully comprehending the underlying themes therein, during that initial time, I felt, on a subconscious, gut-level, what Sting, predominately, was trying to communicate to his audience, to me. And it was ultimately this internal drive and curiosity to understand and to learn that I believe "the seeds to my intellectual being" were originally sown, as pretentious as that may sound. The world was then beginning to really open up to me, to my individual purview, and I wanted to absorb and understand as much of it as I could stand to take in without feeling overwhelmed and frightened by it all, and so the irrepressible urge to express myself, artistically, emerged.

Consequently, I became an avid reader, socially-conscious, and started writing my own songs, which showed, quite obviously, the immediate influence of Sting and The Police. By February of 1984, I had all five of The Police's proper albums in my possession, and they undoubtedly became my favorite band, and top musical artist in general. They've remained a beloved, and continuously enriching, favorite of mine for the past thirty years. And "Synchronicity" has become the single most important and impactful album on my life.

The Anamorphic Stain of Reality in Holbein's "The Ambassadors"

The Anamorphic Stain of Reality in Holbein's "The Ambassadors"

by James Albert Barr

"The time is out of joint - O cursed spite,
 That ever I was born to set it right." - William Shakespeare: Hamlet

"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life." - Karl Marx

In 1533, Hans Holbein the Younger (named thusly, because his father, who was also a renowned painter, is referred to as Hans Holbein the Elder) painted a commissioned double-portrait work that would insure him everlasting fame and admiration, but would also haunt art historians, aficionados, academicians and philosophers to this day. The painting is entitled, "The Ambassadors".

Aside from its astonishing artistry and brilliantly, meticulously rendered details (which he learned from Da Vinci and the Flemish masters, such as Jan van Eyck), a cursory glance at the painting shows a depiction of two wealthy and distinguished 16th century gentlemen posing with an assortment of devices, instruments and books on a couple of shelves (a furniture item known back then in England as a "whatnot"); the top one of which they both lean on from opposite ends.

But upon closer inspection one can perceive an odd-shaped image in the lower foreground of the painting. What is that strange object? Well, in order to make out what it is you have to shift your view laterally, because what you're looking at is, in fact, the most famous use of anamorphosis in the history of painting. When seen from a side view, you will realize that Holbein placed, as a superimposition, an anamorphically-distorted human skull! What appears to be a fairly normal portrait suddenly becomes "denatured" and "uncanny". And given that the distorted object is a human skull, it further unsettles the painting's narrative by rendering it ominous and foreboding.

The two figures posing in the painting are reputed to be Jean de Dinteville (the ornately dressed aristocrat and landowner) on the viewer's left, who actually commissioned the painting from Holbein, and Georges de Selve (the clergyman in the long robe) on the viewer's right. The circumstances that brought these three men together proved to be extraordinary and historically significant.

Hans Holbein was a German-born artist and printmaker who moved to England, from Basel, Switzerland, in 1526 seeking employment after getting a recommendation from renowned Renaissance humanist/theologian, Desiderius Erasmus, whose portrait Holbein famously painted in 1523. Among the well-known commissions incurred by Holbein during his first period in England was a 1527 portrait of Sir Thomas More (then a successful writer and knighted speaker of Parliament whose novel, "Utopia" - from which the title-word he had coined - had been published in 1516; he would play a significant, if tragic, role in the religious upheaval that Holbein would witness and record, if understandably subtly, while working under Henry VIII's embattled court). 

After returning to Basel for a few years, Holbein chose to resume his career back in England, in 1532, under the considerable patronage of Anne Boleyn (second wife of Henry VIII) and Thomas Cromwell (English lawyer, statesman, and chief minister to the King). By 1535, Holbein would become the portrait painter in the court of King Henry VIII. Holbein's portraits of the royal family - most notably of King Henry VIII himself - and nobles are regarded as the definitive images we have and know of these historical figures.

By 1532, the year of Holbein's return to England, Europe was embroiled in great religious strife and revolution due to a severe division within the Christian Church. This was precipitated by disillusioned German monk and priest, Martin Luther, in 1517, when he famously nailed his highly controversial "Ninety-Five Theses" to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, Germany, in protest to what he believed was corruption in the Roman Catholic Church and its Papacy, thus provoking the Protestant Reformation and the establishment of the Lutheran Church, and later a Calvinist offshoot (which would decidedly develop the notion of the "Protestant Work Ethic", thus alleged to have been responsible for the advent of capitalism, according to fin de siècle sociologist, Max Weber, in his famous 1905 book, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism"). As a result, many wars and mutual persecutions ensued throughout much of the 16th century in Europe.

Before 1532, the Church of England was under the authority of Rome, but when Henry VIII attempted to get an annulment/divorce from his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon in 1527, because she didn't provide him with a male heir (and he was then courting Anne Boleyn besides), he was denied by Pope Clement VII via Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, whose failure to secure a divorce for Henry resulted in his downfall as Archbishop of York, getting arrested for treason in 1529 after having been stripped of his government office and property initially, and died from illness in late 1530 before any sentence could be carried out. 

To finally get a divorce for Henry, the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer (after his predecessor,William Warham, died), pulled some crafty strings in eliciting an ultimate approval from the Pope, who was unaware of Henry's ulterior motive with the Church of England.When the new Lord Chancellor and chief minister, Thomas More, who was a devout Roman Catholic and resolutely opposed to divorce, stubbornly refused to publicly acknowledge Henry's annulment from Catherine and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn, which Thomas Cranmer had announced as legitimate, Henry, with the help of his new chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, and blessing from Cranmer, decided to dramatically remove the Church of England from Rome's, and, thusly, Roman Catholicism's, authority by instituting the 1534 Act of Supremacy legislation, hence making Henry VIII the Supreme Head of the Church of England, which he then converted to Protestantism, which did not oppose divorce. Thomas More was subsequently arrested, tried and convicted for treason. He was sentenced to death and beheaded on July 6, 1535.

And so it was a year before the 1534 Act Of Supremacy that both Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve came to England as ambassadors (hence the title of Holbein's monumental painting) and emissaries for Francis I of France in hopes of talking Henry VIII out of leaving the Roman Catholic Church. While visiting London for this extremely important political mission, de Dinteville commissioned Holbein to paint his portrait along with fellow ambassador and friend, George de Selve. Unfortunately, their diplomatic mission, and likely de Selve's prays, eventually failed.

Under the apparent auspices of the religious circumstances and tense atmosphere in England at the time, Holbein, and likely de Dinteville himself, evidently chose a very significant day to have "The Ambassadors" painted. On the upper shelf of the painting where all the scientific instruments are displayed, one can notice a polyhedral sundial just left of de Selve's right elbow. To the trained eye, one can read the time and date on the sundial. It, in fact, reads April 11, 1533 at approximately 4 p.m. in the afternoon. In other words, it was Good Friday when Holbein painted this unforgettable portrait.

What is also quite significant is that that day happened to correspond with the 1500th anniversary of Christ's crucifixion. No doubt the painting is positively rife with pregnant messages and codes! These include the broken string on the lute located on the lower shelf. The lute symbolized harmony, and with a string broken on Holbein's lute, it likely symbolized the breach within the Christian Church. However, also seen on the lower shelf is a book opened to a Lutheran hymn, perhaps symbolizing the desire for a reconciliation between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Aside from the anamorphic skull shown in the lower foreground, perhaps the most significant symbol and message in the painting - again, given that it was Good Friday - is, likely, the most subtle. In the top left hand corner of the painting you can just discern, peaking out from behind the green curtain, a crucifix. It only half appears. What did that particularly mean to Holbein? Was it put there as a reminder of Christ's sacrifice on this specific Good Friday? And that, ultimately, it was that symbol that should be acknowledged more simply by both warring churches instead of how the Church should be governed and conducted? Was it put there to contrast with the material symbols of Renaissance achievement so confidently displayed on the whatnot? Or did it more prominently represent a foreboding of the divisive decision of Henry VIII to cause a severe breach between his kingdom and the Catholic Church, thus rendering only half of the crucifix? 

It is interesting that the crucifix is located above de Dinteville and to his right, because when one shifts to their right in order to make out the anamorphic skull one can line up de Dinteville's left eye perfectly with the crucifix and geometrically form a horizontal triangle with the elongated line of the skull. At the apex of the triangle one can then draw a straight line that perfectly separates the top shelf of the whatnot with the bottom shelf, thus creating the north/south division of the celestial sky and heavens (represented by the scientific instruments, such as the celestial globe, used to look upward) with the terrestrial ground of the earth (represented by the earth-bound instruments, such as the terrestrial globe). So Holbein's mathematical and geometric precision is executed remarkably well in the painting.

Now having said all that, the most dominate, and ultimately unsettling, image and symbol depicted in "The Ambassadors" in unquestionably the anamorphic skull. Many of the painting's interpreters believe the skull to represent memento mori: "Remember that you are mortal and will die one day". However, not immediately noticeable on de Dinteville's hat is, in fact, a skull! Apparently, memento mori was de Dinteville's own motto! So it would suggest that the anamorphic skull isn't necessarily being used here as a mortality symbol per se, because the rendering of more than one skull seems a bit superfluous within the painting's rich narrative. I believe it represents something much more significant than just a reminder of our own mortality, fragility and transience, though I will agree that the skull still represents something definitely negative, but it's something that actually transcends, or is outside of, the general purview of consciousness.

I've good reason to believe that Holbein's anamorphic skull is the earliest adumbration, or initial sign, of what a few renowned, modernist writers and thinkers (such as T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence) in the early 20th century initially alluded to, and what Frank Kermode, in his 1957 book, Romantic Image, directly implied, and Keith Alldritt formally asserted in his 1968 book, The Making of George Orwell, as "the bifurcation of human consciousness"; the breaking and split in the collective mind and heart of late Renaissance Europe.

It's quite astonishing, and literally mind-bending, that Holbein's skull should appear to be an incredible precursor of modernist art in the 20th century with its surrealist, and montage-like, character. It immensely sticks out - unlike anything else during the Renaissance and right up to the Industrial Revolution - like an infinitely disturbing "stain", an intrusive alien-like presence that defies any linguistic economy, an ineffable rip or tear in the very fabric of human consciousness, let alone the narrative field of the painting's more contemporaneous signs. It is, as Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, refers to, a "surplus knowledge" that severely contaminates the gaze and suspends the ostensive meaning of the painting. It ultimately represents a reality that precipitated as a result of the Protestant Reformation and Henry VIII's abuse and exploitation of power, further allowing for Calvinist Protestantism to inaugurate the capitalist economic system through the Protestant Ethic of hard work to acquire material wealth as a way to better one's chances of getting into Heaven. Like a now useless husk, capitalism would eventually discard Protestantism and become a fully secular monetary system devoid of any religious mandates, or any other meaning other than to simply, collectively, and ever expansively, accumulate wealth and material goods for its own sake.                     

Like the late 16th/early 17th century Baroque period of the German "Trauerspiel" (i.e., mourning-play) that would express, allegorically, the growing sense of "mourning" and futility of life drained of all meaning, through the plays of Daniel Caspers von Lohenstein, Andreas Gryphius; the Spaniard, Calderon de la Barca, and most importantly, Shakespeare's 1601 play, "Hamlet" (which according to the 20th century German essayist, Walter Benjamin, in his monumental book, "The Origin of German Tragic Drama" [1928] is the single most significant mourning-play), Holbein's skull projects the harbinger of mourning that would suffuse through Europe over the course of the next 100 years, because of this "bifurcation in human consciousness" that seemingly and slowly drained the world of sustainable meaning. It expressed a new, burgeoning reality that was inexpressible, and incomprehensible to the conscious mind (and I suspect even Holbein's as well), at that ground-zero time in history.

Culture in a Moribund State

                                                                                                                                                                            Has Culture and its Inhabitants become Zombie-like?

by James Albert Barr

Despite all the, mostly, celebratory advances in technology, medicine, science and the overall quality of life, our contemporary culture is discernibly and collectively confronting a cul-de-sac, a dead-end. It's perhaps no coincidence that in popular culture today (and for pretty much the last decade, actually) "zombies" have captured our imagination and attention on a scale that far surpasses the initial forays of the, predominantly, cinematic subgenre famously established by George A. Romero in the late 60s with his cult classic, "Night of the Living Dead", and his 1978 and 1985 follow-ups, "Dawn of the Dead" and "Day of the Dead".

Aside from a few other note-worthy entries into the annals of "zombie movies", and a slew of low-budget, direct-to-video ones, the true zombie craze didn't erupt until after the millennium, notably with the release of Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" in 2002, which significantly "reanimated" the subgenre in horror flicks. The AMC and Fox cable series, "The Walking Dead", is one of the most watched, critically acclaimed, and discussed television shows currently airing. Katy Hershbereger, of St. Martin's Press, stated in 2009 that "In a world of traditional horror, nothing is more popular right now than zombies...The living dead are here to stay".

It has been said that zombie movies symbolize our collective anxiety about the notion of "the end of the world". We now are all quite familiar with the idea of a "zombie apocalypse"; it has thoroughly entered into the vernacular of pop-culture. A new Brad Pitt movie, "World War Z", adapted from Max Brooks' 2006 novel, is about to open, which depicts such an apocalypse. In the movie's trailer you can plainly see waves upon waves of running zombies piling over one another like a swarm of ants attacking, with pure implacable atavism, any and all normal, "living" humans. 

The zombies also act like a wildly spreading virus, aptly enough, given the viral vulnerability of cyberspace, let alone our biological environment coupled with terrorist paranoia in the post 9/11 world we've been living in for over a decade. Throw in a continuously precarious economy, and you have a very palpable sense of uncertainty, anxiety, willy-nilly aggression, necessary escapism, soulless hedonism, and a considerable cross-section of depressives populating a discombobulated world unsure of its future en masse, or unsure, mostly unconsciously, if it even wants a future. I, quite frankly, suspect that there were many who were ultimately disappointed, if indirectly, that the whole "Mayan calendar thing" didn't actually manifest into a veritable "end of the world" scenario.

Why is this, you may ask? Because I feel an ever-growing sense of people realizing more and more, mostly subliminally, that culture is basically finished, nay dead, in the so-called first-world; that it is, in fact, in a "zombie state", but doesn't know it consciously, of course, as it continues to incessantly maintain the capitalist system, seemingly ad nauseam, for its own empty sake.

Oswald Spengler wrote a seismic book titled "The Decline of the West", which was published right after World War 1, that showed an incredible degree of erudition wherein he presented cultures throughout history, such as ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, like an organism. They had a birth, a lifespan, and a decline or death. Spengler used the four seasons, actually, to layout, figuratively, the lifespan of a past culture, and he claimed that our culture, the West, was entering its "winter season", thus its final stage, the process of its inevitable decline and passing.

"All things must pass", as George Harrison once sang. Is this an immutable truism? Will the evident fate that befell ancient Egypt and Greece and Rome befall us as well? Can there, in fact, be some kind of, what I would call, a "positive" recrudescence of renewed activity, a cultural revival, or rebirth of sorts, a new Renaissance perhaps, that can be initiated and carried through in order to essentially save our culture, our world?