“Every
breath you take
And
every move you make
Every
bond you break, every step you take,
I'll
be watching you.”—“Every Breath You Take,”
written by Sting, performed on the Synchronicity
LP by The Police (1983)
Repeated
playing of this song on the radio starting this month 30 years ago—when it
first went to #1 in the U.K.—along with its soft, seductive minor chords—led
me—and, I suspect, more than a few others—to mistake its meaning. It took
composer Sting, in interviews, to point me toward what he called variously the
“obsession,” “jealousy” and “surveillance” at its heart.
Sting
wrote the piece after the breakup of his first marriage, and it’s easy to think
of it as a classic torch song of lost love, especially with that desolate
outcry in the middle (“Since you've gone I've been lost without a trace”). But
the first stanza should be a hint enough of its true nature, in the insistence
of that word “every,” concluding with a line that becomes all the more chilling
the more you let its implications sink in: “I’ll be watching you.”
In
other words, folks, the 1983 Grammy-winning Song of the Year, embraced all over
the world, was all about stalking.
Give Mr. Sumner credit: he has always made clear that it is a stalking song, an homage to the Reagan/Thatcher Era.
ReplyDeleteSince he is a gracious former teacher, he does not reply to people who come up to them and say "We used 'Every Breath You Take' as our Wedding Song!" with "Are you ****ing kidding me?" But he has always made clear that he thinks that.