Punk is dead...

From the long line of performances by revived rock grandpas, today: The Police. A double critique befitting the band's significance. Part 1 says: An era is being laid to rest.

Recently, Sting sang Renaissance songs accompanied by a lute. The quality of the performance was debatable, but it suited him, the mature intellectual with a sense of appropriate artistic behaviour. Now he's back on stage with The Police, and one wonders why he's doing it. After all, the band, which folded two decades ago, was one of the most enduringly remembered bands in pop history.

In the years that followed, all three involved never tired of emphasizing in interviews that they had not only grown apart, but definitely had nothing more to say to each other.

So now, before they end up like the Beatles, concerts in sports arenas around the world, and in Munich, of course, at the Olympic Stadium. The weather is playing along: a glorious late summer evening. The Police take the stage, appearing to be their old selves again—and indeed, they are. Waves of sympathy surge toward them, tinged with melancholy. For Messrs. Gordon Matthew Sumner, Stewart Copeland, and Andrew Summers are laying an era to rest.

They do so with a gesture of serenity, aware that they are museum-like ambassadors of a phase of pop music when, with the commercialization of punk, it was losing the previously salvaged innocence of independence. The Police were the driving force behind this development at the time; their success was a sign of the decline of the adolescent values of resistance and aesthetic protest, their subsequent silence the consequence of the realization that they had achieved not change, but only the cementing of monetary power relations.

Sting knows this, of course; he even makes it an issue when he mocks the platitude of a song like 'De Do Do Do,' which he doesn't actually want to sing. You can see it in his face when he digs out the supposedly critical lyrics beyond the evergreen love songs, which, like 'Invisible Sun,' seemed strangely naïve from the perspective of time. In fact, you notice that everything that came out after the freaky second album 'Regatta de Blanc' no longer has the power of the band's first snotty and boisterous statements.

Perhaps this is also what still embarrasses The Police, this casual corruption of the 'Message in a Bottle' by the mechanisms of business. Which is why they duly donate a portion of the proceeds from this summer's most successful tour to the Water Aid organization and use the money to build wells. This isn't cynicism, the celebrity do-gooderism; after all, all three artists of The Police are among the remaining idealists who hope to retain a spark of their past.

But on the other hand, they're no different from the other dinosaurs of pop history. A veteran combo with a smart hit program without a single new song, without anything that points to the future, not the past. Punk is dead, now for good, after one of its last myths has publicly bid farewell.

(c) Süddeutschen Zeitung by Ralf Dombrowski