Sting totally overrates himself

Singer songwriter, former frontman of shit band The Police and 70's key party enthusiast Sting recently savaged today's contemporary music scene with a few controversial statements totally not intended to get Sting's name back in the limelight in time for the release of his new album.

Yes, in case you were wondering, Sting does have a new album out: a compelling-sounding collection of Dowland lute music called Songs from the Labyrinth. In what some would argue is merely a weak justification for creating said pretentious self indulgent vanity project of outdated music Sting has declared, "Rock music has come to a standstill -- it's not going forward any more, it only bores me."

Admittedly he is probably right. The bands frequently being given such lofty labels as "the next big thing" and "the saviours of rock and roll" by rubbish music rags such as NME and Q are getting increasingly worse (see The Libertines, Jet, Arctic Monkeys etc.) This, of course, is all a bit rich coming from the guy who wrote that glib "every step you take" song everyone played a lot when Princess Diana died. And it is an established objective fact that popular music actually went a little bit backward the day Puff Daddy sampled said song inexplicably to much success.

However, Sting doesn't need some random guy on the internet tearing apart his musical credibility; he does a good job of it himself! In the same interview he states that he got into the music industry for the money: "Forty years ago it was my dream to break out of Newcastle and never be poor again." And if my twenty-something years of life spent listening to self-important, blow-hard and ironically rich rockstars has taught me anything, it is that any musician with the desire to make a bit of cash out of their quite often awful melodic warblings is instantly a dirty rotten sell-out and probably also a commie hippie terrorist Thatcherite.

Plus Sting was in that terrible Dune movie so he really does have no credibility went it comes to these things.

But just before you start to think all aging rockstars are bitter, old, untalented jealous has-beens who should have died when they were 27 ala Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townsend frontman of The Who has done his bit for elderly musicians who aren't actually all that shit. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine he declared that nostalgia acts were total arse and he had no desire to see "old guys in their self-congratulatory mode." I can relate; I watched the Simon and Garfunkel reunion DVD Old Friends the other day and was repulsed by what I could only, perhaps a little dishonestly, describe as two guys masturbating while listening to April Come She Will.

Pete Townsend then went on to state that he felt like a "triumphant liberating giant come to release a million captive children" but for the purposes of my argument that Pete Townshend = good, Sting = BAD we'll pretend that he didn't actually say that.