Syncronicity II

I made the finals in a local singing contest this weekend… I may do this classic by The Police.    

http://www.dmarkette.com/syncro
I was addcited to The Police in jr high school.  Syncronicity came out when I was a freshman in High School and I mleted the tape I listened to it so much.  I know this song like the back of my hand.  I think I nailed it on the first try I really should have sang when I was younger  I am an idiot. I was too busy being a jock I guess.  There is nothing that gives me a greater high than singing.  Thank you God for this gift.

“Synchronicity II” is a song by The Police, described by ‘People Weekly’ as aggressive and steely.^[1] It was recorded in 1983 and was included on the album Synchronicity . It was released as a single in the UK and the U.S. by A&M Records. The third single from the album, it reached #17 in the UK Singles Chart in October 1983 and #16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1983. It featured non-album track “Once Upon a Daydream” on the b-side.

Meaning of the song

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 terrible 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 the man humiliated by his boss (evoking a painful mental image to strengthen this feeling: “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 — perhaps a parallel to the industrial and suburban angst, or to the father’s own inner anguish. In “Synchronicity II” lead guitarist Andy Summers “forgoes the pretty clean sounds for post-apocalyptic squeals and crashing power chords,” writes Matt Blackett in Guitar Player magazine.^[2]

Interpretations of the lyrical content vary widely ^{[3] [4]} . Writing in Entertainment Weekly about a 1996 Sting tour, Chris Willman said:

“The late-inning number that really gets [the crowd] galvanized is the edgy old Police staple that has the most old-fashioned unresolved rock tension in it, “Synchronicity II” —which, after all, is a song about a domestic crisis so anxiety producing that it wakes up the Loch Ness monster.”^[5]

Sting explained the theme of the song to Time magazine:

“Jung believed there was a large pattern to life, that it wasn’t just chaos. Our song Synchronicity II is about two parallel events that aren’t connected logically or causally, but symbolically.”^[6]

“Synchronicity II” also may have taken inspiration from the poem “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. The theme of “The Second Coming” is similar to that of “Synchronicity II”—a civilization beginning to collapse, and the rise of something new, something perhaps savage, to take its place. “Synchronicity I,” on the same album, also alludes to The Second Coming. Its lyrics include a term from “The Second Coming”, “Spiritus Mundi” (literally “spirit of the world”), which Yeats used to refer to the collective unconscious, another of Jung’s theories.

Throughout the song, the musical tone follows the lyrics closely. The description of the man’s working day is first underlaid with confident-sounding but chordless guitar notes, which in each verse segue through rising tension into a menacing scene of the creature. The final verse carries an image and tone worthy of a horror movie: “There’s a shadow on the door / Of a cottage on the shore / Of a dark Scottish lake / Many miles away.” A longer than usual melodic line^[1] makes the transition between the urban and creature horror.

The music video for the song was directed by Godley & Creme. The video showed the band performing on giant piles of junk, car parts, wires, etc. with debris and papers flying about. When the chorus comes in, a shot of a giant lake is portrayed, with the video ending on a shot of a high-speed camera rushing over the entire lake.

Share on Facebook