The Police - Outlandos D'Amour (Music Monday)
Three bleach blonde fake punks play some fake reggae
Allow me to take you back to a more civilized age - the late 1970s, when high school teachers could masquerade as punks, and a bottle of hair dye could do a lot of marketing for you. A time that gave us one of the most improbably huge-yet-unassuming debut records of all time: The Police's Outlandos d'Amour.
Now if you're only familiar with the band's standard-bearing pop/rock masterpiece Synchronicity, you'd be forgiven for assuming their first outing was some similarly sleek new wave confection designed to burn up the radio. But you'd be dead wrong - Outlandos d'Amour is a wonderfully unhinged reggae-punk-jazz cyclone of an album that makes zero sense on paper yet remains stupidly fresh 45+ years later (yikes! Had to check my math 3x on that).
Right out of the gate, this album rocks. "Next To You" gets to the vocals before the 4 second mark. "So Lonely" (a minute too long, I realize half a century later), and "Roxanne." But those are just the tip of the iceberg. The funky strut of "Peanuts" showcased the band's prowess at assimilating disparate genres into their sound. The unhinged punk-jazz freakout "Truth Hits Everybody." The catchy hook of “Can’t Stand Losing You” with the added fun of once having dated a girl who had a brother, while maybe not six feet ten, was quite tall.
Of course, most casual radio listeners only caught wind of Outlandos's lead single "Roxanne" back in the day. A sparse, haunting song about a hooker working the red light district, it became a ubiquitous classic rock staple precisely because it sounded like absolutely nothing else on the airwaves. Just Sting's eerie nasal drone riding Andy Summers' cyclical guitar licks for 3 straight minutes - mood and vibe and a killer chorus that goes like this, “Roxannnnnne, Roxannnnnnne, Roxannnnnne, Roxannnnne, Roxannnnne” until the final time around when you can add about 10 more of those
Somehow this weird art-punk curio resonated across the globe and kicked the entire Police phenomenon into high gear.
From there, the rest is history. The band quickly graduated to arenas and multiplatinum successors like Reggatta de Blanc and Zenyatta Mondatta...but they never strayed too far from the skittish, genre-blurring artfulness of their debut. Outlandos set the blueprint - a kaleidoscopic melting pot of styles and influences unified by sheer manic energy and technical proficiency.
Truly, very few freshman LPs have arrived this fully-formed and bursting at the seams with incredible songs and new ideas. The Police aimed for cult status but ended up conquering the world instead, all because their weird art-rock didn't sound like anything else on Earth in 1978. An alien transmission of punk poetry, lovers' laments and Caribbean rhythms that still stuns today. Even if they'd never followed it up, Outlandos d'Amour would still be canon - the nascent seeds of a game-changing pop revolution disguised as utter freak-punk chaos.