Buy This CD In the first round of censoring music either by outright banning or revision, we will have to focus on the outwardly sick and misogynist music. This album stands in another category--promotion of the romance culture.
From beginning to end, this album is about dating and the little strings that bind with one exception. "Spirits in the Material World" mentions politicians and comes off slightly anarchist. In a few words, the song opposes revolution, the status quo and consumer culture and merely says there must be a better way.
This album was popular because it was the perfect syrup that offended no one. There is no dark misogyny, only songs of cute puppy love or maybe sugary love. The musical form matches the message completely and amazingly consistently, while mixing in everso slight reggae influences from the early 1980s.
As Paul McCartney said, these are "silly love songs." They are about being "wrapped around" the finger of a lover which is an expression for saying completely close and dependent to the point of powerlessness. For MIM, this sort of song is actually an expression of unhealthy individualism. For countless people, especially wimmin, this sort of song represents the goal of life, a close emotional tie with one persyn.
The pursuit of individual closeness to the exclusion of social harmony at a larger level is what we suffer in our feminist movements and all social movements. In fact, the pursuit of this sort of intimacy is bound up with what we call gender privileges. While revolution can foster the basis for stronger social relations throughout society, the pursuit of those closer ties now inside the existing rotten society actually distracts from larger social impulses in tens of millions of people living in imperialist country romance culture. When The Police sing of the "King of Pain," a pathetic individual lost in rejection of love, they refer to millions of people who are otherwise well-adjusted to society, have time, have money but who contribute nothing to larger society-wide ties--in the name of suffering in connection to one individual. This gender privilege and romance culture is a gift to the bourgeoisie, the small class of exploiters that require division and paralysis in the masses at large.
Although this album signified much that was wrong in popular culture at the time, the lead singer Sting made up for it later in life with his energetic activism on behalf of Third World debt relief. He has a good internationalist sense of reforms to fight for.