honky cracker: On Sting (and other crap) I don't like Sting. I can't explain why. I don't have any good reason for disliking Sting. I never got into The Police. Now, I don't find their music to be "bad" or revolting in a Coldplay sort of way. For me it's just sort of there, doing nothing. His solo work sounds like bland, unispired adult contemporary radio station fodder. He might as well be Richard Marx.
But it goes deeper than that. I look at Sting and my brain goes "I don't like that guy." You know when you were a kid, and you'd watch a TV show or a movie and it was very clear who was the "good guy" and who was the "bad guy"? You'd know the good guy when you saw him, you'd know the bad guy when you saw him. Yeah. When I see Sting I get that same childish "this guy is the bad guy" reaction. It's completely unfair, unearned, and undeserved. But it's there.
Okay, maybe it's not completely unfair, unearned, and undeserved. I know exactly where my hatred of Sting comes from. I was probably the only seven year old in the world who was way, WAY into the Dune movie when it came out.1 And Sting played Feyd Rautha -- the silent, fierce looking thug nephew of the evil Baron Harkonnen. So, of course, my seven year old brain gets to thinking. "Sting. Bad guy in movie. Goes by 'Sting'. Plays rock and roll. He must be a mean tough guy. He has a knife. I bet he knifes people in alleys and laughs at them. Sting is bad!2" And this was the version of Sting I've always kept in my head -- the knife-wielding, innocent-person mugging bully. That's what I see when I see Sting. Well, there's a little more than that now. Now I see him and think "that guy can have sex with his eyes closed and without moving for 12 hours straight. He is better than you. He must be brought down."
Of course, he doesn't seem like a bad guy by any stretch of reality. I mean, none of us know the guy, but he seems like an affable chap. He seems to have a sense of humor. Does all that stuff for Amnesty International. His music isn't bad, it's just kind of there. He's done nothing to deserve this. But every time I see Sting, I have that "he is the enemy" reaction, and there isn't anything anyone can do about it.
1 It really sucks being the only kid who was way into Dune. I would always want to play it on the playground, in the way that you play Star Wars and pretend you're characters from the movie. Do you know how hard it is to try to convince other seven year olds to play fucking Dune with you?
"Everybody follow me to the desert planet! We're gonna go mine some spice!"
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"Okay, now you put my hand in a box."
"Why?"
"Because you're testing me to see if I'm the Kwisatz Haderach."
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"Huummmmmmmmmm"
"What are you doing?"
"I'M KILLING YOU WITH SOUND!!!!!"
2 On the other hand, Kyle MacLachlan became a huge hero of mine. Fucking loved Kyle MacLachlan when I was a kid. Like, up there with Han Solo, Indiana Jones, and Mouth from "The Goonies". I watched Twin Peaks when it originally aired. I didn't get it, but I watched it. My dad took me to see Blue Velvet in the theater when I was eight because he thought it was the sequel to Dune. Afterward we went out for PBR tall boys and amyl nitrate. Good times, good times.
