The relative silence of rock stars in relation to Bush’s war on Iraq has been both morally repugnant and revealing. Even Ireland’s officially designated “humanitarians” Geldof and Bono choose to focus more on the issue of Third World Debt. Highly commendable, of course, but not quite the same as grabbing Bush and Blair by the throat, literally or metaphorically, and saying “stop committing genocide in Iraq.”
Enter stage left Sting who will always be remembered as the rock star who decided to give, rather than cancel at the last moment, though he wanted to, a concert from his home in Italy on September 11th 2001. At the time “people needed some kind of therapy, just to be together” he explains now in relation to his new album Sacred Love, which he hopes will extend that kind of therapy.
Sadly, Sting “didn’t want to write specifically about the situation”, but more so about “something that is happening in the human spirit, whether you are American or British or from the Islamic world”.
So is he copping out? In a sense. Even on the album’s most specific song, ‘This War’, no political power is addressed, no one is grabbed by the throat, no one is blamed.
The lyrical focus is far sharper on the title track, which finds him singing of closing the world, and all wars, outside and trying to find God in your lover’s body. Tantric Sting again? Obviously. In a similarly transcendent light Sting and Mary J. Blige couple so closely the dividing lines become invisible on the track ‘Whenever I Say Your Name’ which, again, sums up his romanticism in the line, “whenever I say your name/I’m already praying.” In ‘Forget About The Future’, Sting less successfully compares a battling couple to the squabbling countries at the United Nation.
Casting his gaze elsewhere, ‘Dead Man’s Rope’ and ‘Never Coming Home’ deal, respectively, with the plight of a man and a woman at a “crossroads” in life, whilst the ponderous ‘The Book Of My Life’ has its roots in the fact hat Sting is currently completing the second volume of his autobiography. If it’s as self-serving and po-faced as the first volume, one can hardly wait.
But at least the man has tried to address the single most important issue of the century thus far, and for that fact alone Sacred Love deserves your attention.