The Police, Synchronicity II lyric question

May 1, 2023 12:55 PM

For the verse "Another industrial ugly morning / The factory belches filth into the sky / He walks unhindered through the picket lines today, / He doesn't think to wonder why". Well, *I'm* now wondering why. Speculation is welcome, but something definitive is preferred.
posted by Tell Me No Lies to Media & Arts (20 answers total)

Because just like the old man in that book by Nabokov, he was conceived in the teeeeeeenytiny mind of Gordon Matthew Sumner, who needed a rhyme for sky.
posted by Don Pepino at 12:58 PM on May 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

Genius has a reasonable take on that. Click the line you're interested in for someone's analysis of it.
posted by adamrice at 1:03 PM on May 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I always took it to mean that he just walked through the picket lines but didn't think about why there were strikers; he was in management and didn't care.
posted by cooker girl at 1:21 PM on May 1, 2023 [26 favorites]

I think cooker girl has it. The guy is a mindless working stiff who never thinks about human interaction.
posted by Dr. Wu at 1:31 PM on May 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is the interpretation from Genius linked above:

In 1983, Britain was still reeling from years of calamitous labor disputes. The strikes largely ended with Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative victory in the 1979 general election and legislation to restrict unions.

Sting is suggesting that the workers lost the battle, in part because of the working-class scabs like this man, who didn’t have the energy to look around and realize they were exploited.

I was thinking along similar lines. The "today" seems to imply a break from the previous pattern. Normally strikers might push back on people trying to cross the picket lines; not pushing back now when previously they used to implies that they feel the fight is over, one way or another. Him crossing doesn't make a difference anymore.
posted by trig at 1:45 PM on May 1, 2023 [11 favorites]

I wasn’t quite buying that top-level Genius comment, because if the workers have lost, why would there still be a picket line at all? Never having given it too much thought, I guess my assumption was always more along the lines of this reply:

he isn’t hindered because the striking workers have diverted their attention to something more ominous than picketing... consistent with the other themes of the song that things are at the breaking point – that the monster is approaching – that a revolution (or at least violence) is afoot.

posted by staggernation at 2:03 PM on May 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

if the workers have lost, why would there still be a picket line at all?

My assumption was that they're there but dispirited; the strike hasn't quite ended yet, but they know it's basically over.
posted by trig at 2:08 PM on May 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

As a kid I always thought it was because he was too insignificant even to give a shit about as a scab. But I also heard it as "each day," not "today," which does spin it differently.
posted by praemunire at 2:31 PM on May 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

What he doesn't think to wonder is not why there are picket lines but why he's walking unhindered through those picket lines today. Normally he is hindered. Not today. Presumably it's because he's channeling the Loch Ness monster. Because his life as an upper middle class English salaryman is such a hellpit, as evidenced by the fact that his Rice Krispies are loud. Sting bugs me because, among countless other insults to decency, he will do anything for a rhyme and he does not know how to kill his babies or ever suspect for a fraction of an instant that one of them might need to be sacrificed. I bet he had a fifteen-minute-long tantric experience when he thought of that stupid Rice Krispies line.

"That book, what's it's name? You know, the one by Nabokov? The one with the old man who was always shaking and coughing?"
"Awrr, which book's that, bruv? Pnin?" OMG STING IS THE WORST SONGWRITER IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH.
posted by Don Pepino at 6:55 PM on May 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

Mod note: A few deleted. Please focus on the actual question about the meaning of the line indicated in this song. Thanks.
posted by taz (staff) at 1:35 AM on May 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think this is a song about incipient domestic violence.

I'd always taken his newfound ability to walk unhindered through the picket line as an indication that Daddy has begun to project an air of being on the edge of failing to contain the explosive response to his circumstances that he's been suppressing for a very long time.

I fear as much for the safety of his family once that pain upstairs does more than make his eyeballs ache as I do for the distant occupants of the loch cottage.
posted by flabdablet at 4:21 AM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

The other lines about him are passive;

"But all he ever thinks to do is watch"
"And every single meeting with his so called superior Is a humiliating kick in the crotch"

So the line about the picket line is also about him being passive and just accepting what occurs without much thought.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:30 AM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

That too. I think there also has to be some kind of correlation between the monster rising from the loch and a monster rising in the car, though, or there wouldn't be any synchronicity.
posted by flabdablet at 4:41 AM on May 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

IMO, the synchronicity is that Daddy "... knows that something somewhere has to break", as in he's wishing for a change. The change he expects is like a divorce but he comes out ahead, his kids start acting right, or whatever, but instead a lake monster is going to upend society (I guess?).
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:07 AM on May 3, 2023

flabdablet is totally right: daddy and the many miles monster are moving in tandem. Up to now, they've both been passively floating in stasis just tolerating their unpleasant lives, daddy enduring an endless stream of days as a working stiff, the monster buried in slime at the bottom of the loch. The song describes the day that changes. Throughout the course of this particular suburban FAMily morning, industrial UUUgly morning, workingDAAAy and rush hour HELL, we see both daddy and the monster stir in a new way. They begin to surface from oblivion and move toward Great Violence TM. Daddy spends the day watching, ruminating, and twice (twiiiiiceomgwhydidn'tanyoneworkshopthisshit), staring into "the distance," and we can safely conclude that this is his usual: we know that all he ever thinks to do is watch, just like we know all mother's suicides are fake.

Daddy does not appear to be consciously aware that anything is different, but we listeners know more about daddy than daddy does. This is primarily because daddy is a cliché--fed-up rat-race dad about to snap, family in the cross-hairs--but also because we know about this monster in the lake many miles away, we know what's going on with the monster, we know that this album and this song are called Synchronicity, and we know that the monster and daddy have synchronized their watches, so to speak. So we know that daddy is up to something new.

Even if we didn't have the monster metaphor, we have Sting. Listen to him voice that line about daddy's so-called superior. I think I've made it pretty clear here that I think Sting is a feeble writer* but Sting disagrees with me. He is highly invested in himself as a creative power and he loves everything he comes up with. Hence, he is committed to howling and gnashing and hardcore hamming like he did in Dune to get his points across--whatever he needs to do to sell this thing. You can't listen to that line as Sting shrieksings it and think daddy's going to stay passive. He is clearly about to bust off and partake in some redpill ultraviolence because he's tired of doing his unpleasant job to make money to pay for food and lodging for his annoying family. Nessie, same deal: clearly pissed off about something and preparing to shed some blood. For reasons that I would argue have to be a lot more interesting than daddy's. What's the monster's problem? Just sick of the loch? Sadly, Sting leaves that more interesting conflict unexplained, just trails off with all those wistful "many miles away."




*Lemmings do not get packed into shiny metal boxes; that's sardines. He wanted to avoid the sardines cliché and "packed like LEMmings" sounds a lot better than "packed like SARdines," so he switched them out. But lemmings is another cliché, and now he's mixed the metaphor. It's so maddeningly much worse, now, so, so much worse... I can't believe this person taught English. The harm he must have done...
posted by Don Pepino at 8:20 AM on May 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

...wait a minute. Maybe "stares into the distance" wasn't Sting lazily resorting to cliché. Maybe it was deliberate. When daddy isn't looking at his family, the picketers, the secretaries, his so-called superior, or other people in cars, before he sees the family home looming in his headlights, throughout the day when he appears to be distracted and looking at nothing, could he actually be focused on something? Namely the monster?

Oh, no, this is bad. I should have quit thinking about this and started binging podcasts while doing the laundry like I planned. GDI, I think I'm starting to kind of like the song.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:33 AM on May 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you gaze long into Sting, Sting gazes also into thee.
posted by flabdablet at 10:13 AM on May 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I really like the idea that the people on the picket line avoided him because they could tell he was just on the edge of something dark and violent. It dovetails nicely with the primeval thing rising out of the lake as well as the image of his mother or mother-in-law screaming at the wall while the family eats breakfast.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 3:11 PM on May 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I always figured he was just so insignificant. But I didn't really get that this was about a red-pilled family obliterator so I guess I can't interpret difficult lyrics over the din of my rice crispies, as they say.

Was this pattern of random violence common in the UK in the early 80s? Seems like a contemporary US problem but maybe Sting for all his violence to language was ahead of his time.
posted by jclarkin at 10:28 AM on May 4, 2023

Response by poster: I dunno about obliteration but I would guess that for every man who crosses to indiscriminate killing there are at least a few hundred who take their frustrations out by violently terrorizing their own family. The brutal family martinet is a theme that goes way back in British culture.

The Rice Krispies line has always seemed clumsy to me but coming as it does immediately after describing grandmother screaming at the wall I’ve figured it meant he’s basically ignoring the screaming and attributing the din to his cereal.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:58 AM on May 5, 2023