The Police

The Police were an English rock band formed in London in 1977. For the majority of their history, the band consisted of Sting (lead singer, bassist and principal songwriter), Andy Summers (guitarist) and Stewart Copeland (drummer). The Police became globally popular in the late 1970s and are generally regarded as one of the first new wave groups to achieve mainstream success, playing a style of rock that was influenced by punk, reggae, and jazz. They are also considered one of the leaders of the Second British Invasion of the U.S. They disbanded in 1986, but reunited in early 2007 for a one-off world tour that ended in August 2008.

Their 1978 debut album, Outlandos d'Amour, reached No. 6 in the UK, and their second album Reggatta de Blanc became the first of five consecutive UK No. 1 albums.Synchronicity from 1983 was No. 1 in both the UK and U.S., selling over 8 million copies in the U.S. alone. The Police have sold over 75 million records, making them one of the world's best-selling artists of all time. They were the world's highest-earning musicians in 2008, thanks to their reunion tour.

Synchronicity II

"Synchronicity II" is a song by The Police, and the third single from their album Synchronicity. Written by lead singer and bassist Sting, it was released as a single in the UK and the U.S. by A&M Records, reached No. 17 in the UK Singles Chart and No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1983. It featured the non-album track "Once Upon a Daydream" on the b-side. The song was described by People Weekly as "aggressive" and "steely."

Background

The song, which refers to Carl Jung's theory of synchronicity, nominally tells the story of an emasculated husband and harried father whose home, work life, and environment are dispiriting and depressing. In an early stretch of lyrics we find "Grandmother screaming at the wall" (family trouble/mental illness), as well as "mother chants her litany of boredom and frustration, but we know all her suicides are fake" (nagging, unhappy spouse). Later, we hear about humiliation by his boss ("and every single meeting with his so-called superior/is a humiliating kick in the crotch"), all the while he "knows that something somewhere has to break". Meanwhile, something monstrous is emerging from a "dark Scottish lake/loch", a reference to the Loch Ness Monster—a parallel to the father's own inner anguish.

Synchronicity

Synchronicity is a concept, first explained by psychiatrist Carl Jung, which holds that events are "meaningful coincidences" if they occur with no causal relationship, yet seem to be meaningfully related. During his career, Jung furnished several slightly different definitions of it.

Jung variously defined synchronicity as an "acausal connecting (togetherness) principle," "meaningful coincidence", and "acausal parallelism." He introduced the concept as early as the 1920s but gave a full statement of it only in 1951 in an Eranos lecture.

In 1952, he published a paper Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge (Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle) in a volume which also contained a related study by the physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli.

Jung's belief was that, just as events may be connected by causality, they may also be connected by meaning. Events connected by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of causality. This contradicts the Axiom of Causality in specific cases but not generally.

Police

A police force is a constituted body of persons empowered by the state to enforce the law, protect property, and limit civil disorder. Their powers include the legitimized use of force. The term is most commonly associated with police services of a sovereign state that are authorized to exercise the police power of that state within a defined legal or territorial area of responsibility. Police forces are often defined as being separate from military or other organizations involved in the defense of the state against foreign aggressors; however, gendarmerie are military units charged with civil policing.

Law enforcement, however, constitutes only part of policing activity. Policing has included an array of activities in different situations, but the predominant ones are concerned with the preservation of order. In some societies, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, these developed within the context of maintaining the class system and the protection of private property. Many police forces suffer from police corruption to a greater or lesser degree. The police force is usually a public sector service, meaning they are paid through taxes.

Stewart Copeland

Stewart Armstrong Copeland (born July 16, 1952) is an American musician, multi-instrumentalist and composer best known as the drummer for the English rock band The Police and for his film music soundtracks. He has also written various pieces of music for ballet, opera and orchestra. According to MusicRadar, Copeland’s "distinctive drum sound and uniqueness of style has made him one of the most popular drummers to ever get behind a drumset". He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Police in 2003 and the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2005.

Early Life

Stewart Armstrong Copeland was born in Alexandria, Virginia on July 16, 1952, the youngest of four children of CIA officer Miles Copeland, Jr. and Scottish archaeologist Lorraine Adie. The family moved to Cairo, Egypt, a few months after his birth, and Copeland spent his formative years in the Middle East. In 1957, the family moved to Beirut, Lebanon, and Copeland attended the American Community School there. He started taking drum lessons at age twelve and was playing drums for school dances within a year. Later he moved to England and attended Millfield from 1967 to 1969. Copeland went to college in California, attending United States International University and UC Berkeley. Returning to England, he worked as road manager for the progressive rock band Curved Air's 1974 reunion tour, and then as drummer for the band during 1975 and 1976.