The Police Songs With Sting's Corniest-Ever Lyrics

For a band that only produced five studio albums from 1978 to 1983, the Police certainly were influential. Eight Grammy nominations, five Grammy wins, 75 million albums sold, and that lucrative sample of "Every Breath You Take" that got used without permission by Diddy when he was still Puff Daddy. the Police have left a permanent mark on popular culture and music. They did so with a very odd, unique, often reggae-tinged blend of new wave meets pop. And then there's frontman Sting, aka the guy who Far Out Magazine once called a lyrical "genius" who wrote a litany of absolutely horrid, corny lyrics.

But first: Lyrics can be corny for a lot of reasons. Wordplay and rhyme schemes might be dumb, lyrics might come across as pompous armchair philosophy (there's a lot of this in the Police), or they might overreach and try too hard. Also, a whole song might be corny in intention or execution, or only a few lines. But no matter the reason, we're sticking with a lyrical analysis for this article and not critiquing the Police's music, unless the music somehow interrelates with the corniness at hand. And yes, some folks will be upset. That's okay. We're sure Sting and his hundreds of millions of dollars (he's worth way more than you might think) won't care one whit about what's said here.

On that note, certain Police songs remain eternally marred by Sting's corniest-ever lyrics. This includes the divisive "Masoko Tanga" and its absolute gibberish, some awful rhymes in "Don't Stand So Close To Me" and "Walking in Your Footsteps," and a whole song from the Police's last album that smacks of a desperate desire to be seen as deep.

The year is 1978. The Police, fully ready to wow the world with their musical brilliance, slip "Masoko Tanga" into the final track position on their debut, "Outlandos D'Amour." The globe, ready to drink deep the lucid poetry of the cosmic prophet, Sting, weeps at the profundity of lyrics like, "Don't ba-bose-da-la-lomb-ba-bay / Ping pong da-la-zoe-da-la-la-low," ... "Day light na-no-ma-do-la / Keep the sugar warmed up, hey," ... "A key word is a mo-way-la / Key-wa-wo-day-wa-wo, I've been / Kicking a wall, baby, 'cause I'm gay / I broke all ma wa-tay-lay-doe / (Ah) People are ghosts, ah my, my, go away."

Ahem. You get the idea, right? Basically, every line of "Masoko Tanga" is the same dumb, corny nonsense. The music's reggae bop isn't silly enough, or the song's lyrical delivery self-aware enough, for "Masoko Tanga" to be taken as a joke. Otherwise, it might work as an improv scat singing session. "Masoko Tanga" also isn't compositionally interesting enough, or the, uh ... "lyrics" cleverly phrased enough for us to handwave the song as a fun, filler track. And try as fans might to twist the song's meaning into some brilliant piece of esoterica about Manichaean duality, Jungian Shadow selves, interplanetary truths hidden in the golden ratio, or whatever, one Reddit fan has already come to "Masoko Tanga's" rescue. As this brave soul eloquently stated, "I like song." Now that's a sentence worthy of "Masoko Tanga."

Like "Masoko Tanga" off 1978's "Outlandos D'Amour," "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" off 1980's "Zenyatta Mondatta" features nonsense words — syllables, really. But unlike "Masoko Tanga," the rest of the song's lyrics illustrate that the emptiness of words is precisely what the song is about. As the opening line says, "Don't think me unkind / Words are hard to find," illustrating that Sting, too, is stuck in the same word quandary as everyone else. So far, so good. And as far as the satirical "De do do do, de da da da" chorus line is concerned, American Songwriter says that Sting got it from his three-year old son, Joe. Also good.

Beyond all this, the song's lyrics become overwrought, psuedo-philosophical drivel, the kind that any precocious sophomore in high school would consider insightful while scribbling in a notebook and sneering at "the system:" "Poets, priests, and politicians / Have words to thank for their positions / Words that scream for your submission / And no one's jamming their transmission." Okay, we get it: podium man bad. Such on-the-nose, tell-don't-show lyricism ought to be a bit embarrassing for Sting, who actually taught English at St. Paul's School in England before becoming famous.

But, this isn't the worst of "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da." We might actually give the song a pass if not for a couplet that ranks amongst the absolute worst, corniest, tone-deaf lines Sting ever wrote. As the pre-chorus says, "And when their eloquence escapes me / Their logic ties me up and rapes me." If you didn't facepalm at that line, then it's time to examine your life.  

No, "Don't Stand So Close To Me" from 1980's "Zenyatta Mondatta" isn't a song about lining up at Dunkin' Donuts (we refuse to just say "Dunkin'"). Despite the la-la tone, typical Police reggae bounce, and bright, major-chord chorus, the song's lyrics describe a disturbing attraction from an underage student to a teacher: "Young teacher, the subject of schoolgirl fantasy / She wants him so badly." Remembering that Sting used to teach English, it might make you feel a tad uncomfortable to see him playing the role of a teacher in the song's music video as a student creeps on him. Then there are lines like, "Temptation, frustration, so bad, it makes him cry / Wet bus stop, she's waiting, his car is warm and dry." Also, did we mention that Sting's into tantra? 

But despite all the potential here for corny lyrics (let alone controversial), "Don't Stand So Close To Me" doesn't make our cut for its subject matter. Rather, it makes the cut for what Sting himself described as a "terrible, terrible rhyme technique," as Rock Reflections quotes. As the song's third verse says of its story's teacher, "It's no use, he sees her, he starts to shake and cough / Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov." Did you catch it? Sting rhymed "shake and cough" with — ready? — "Nabokov." Sigh.

For those not in the know, Vladimir Nabokov wrote the controversial 1955 novel, "Lolita," a story of  a middle-aged professor's attraction to young girls that culminates in an affair with his 12-year old step-daughter. And yes, "Lolita" also directly inspired "Don't Stand So Close To Me." But no matter what, that cough-kov rhyme is rubbish.

Now we're getting into some comically bad lyrical territory. To illustrate, forget for a moment that we're talking about the Police, Sting, or even song lyrics. Just read the following lines: "Hey, Mr. Dinosaur / You really couldn't ask for more / You were God's favorite creature / But you didn't have a future." Would you figure that this was maybe an 8-year-old's poem about his favorite stuffed triceratops, aka, Mr. Dinosaur? Well, well. Those lines and more come from "Walking in Your Footsteps" off the Police's final album, 1983's "Synchronicity," illustrating that it was indeed time for the Police to hang up their hat and for Sting to leave the band.

"Walking in Your Footsteps" isn't terribly awful; it's just corny-supreme. The lyrics sound like the song is supposed to be a cautionary reminder about human hubris, as Mr. Dinosaur was once, "Lord of all that you could see." There's also some pastoral romanticization about the brontosaurus — the really big, long-necked herbivore — being so gentle that it "would not hurt a fly." The dinosaur went extinct and looks like a dumb animal, just like humanity might if it obliterates itself via atomic weaponry. But honestly, we're being generous here. "Walking in Your Footstep" has the germ of a good idea, but its message is confused thanks to poorly phrased lyrics. The whole "the meek shall inherit the earth" reference to the famous Matthew 5:5 Bible verse doesn't clear things up, either.

The worst lyrical offense in "Walking in Your Footsteps" consists of the same "terrible, terrible rhyme technique" that Sting mentions in "Don't Stand So Close To Me." He rhymes "brontosaurus" with "lesson for us." Sigh, again, dude.

Our final pick is probably going to draw the ire of Police fans, if only because it really doesn't contain any single, egregiously cheesy line that no one can deny is awful. Rather, the song is one big, bloated mass of pretension that puts the worst of Sting's pseudo-intellectual juvenility on display. As folks might say nowadays, it's cringe. We're speaking of "Synchronicity I" off the Police's aforementioned final album, 1983's "Synchronicity." "Synchronicity II" was another possibility for this article, but it gets off the hook for at least trying its hand at ground-level, human storytelling rather than noodling with abstractions.

Forget for a moment that, in the decades since The Police released their album "Synchronicity," the word "synchronicity" has gotten warped into nauseating corporate jargon. Thinking only in terms of events that happen to coincide or reflect each other in some way (coincidences, we used to call them), "Synchronicity I" wields concatenated lines to make its point. As the song says: "A connecting principle / Linked to the invisible / Almost imperceptible / Something inexpressible / Science insusceptible / Logic so inflexible," and so on. 

These lyrics are a prime example of how repetition can easily get mistaken for depth. Imagine we're writing a song about someone's obsession with wellness industry fads over common-sense eating habits, and we write, "Macrobiotic / Too psychotic / Probiotic / Distortedly mystic." That's not clever. It's vague and hollow wordplay that's more concerned with appearing profound than connecting with people. That, too, is corny and embarrassing. But hey, at least Sting didn't write about "synchronicity" being a "chronic sin city" or something.