Police Album Titles

Yes, yes, I know. You can hold off on the confused emails. The Police broke up 20 years ago, and I am well aware of this fact. But this could not have been done back then, for I wasn't doing this website 20 years ago, because a) there was no such thing as a website, and b) I was eight years old. So now seems as good a time as any to rate the titles of their albums. This is not a rating of the albums themselves, but just the titles. With titles this odd, someone really should have done this before.

Outlandos d'Amour: Their debut album, it means Outlaws of Love (and yes, that would make a pretty decent band name). Best known for the single "Roxanne," this is a rather cool album title, just foreign enough to be clever, without being obscure. Although considering this was their debut, one has to wonder if the record label was somewhat wary and pushed for them to go with the ho-hum self titled debut. Of course, they would also have been wary of a lead singer who changed his name from Gordon Sumner to Sting. They would have said it wasn't a Good choice. They would have been wrong.

Reggatta De Blanc: I known you're wondering, so I'll tell you right away. This one means White Reggae. I know what you're thinking now — the Police weren't a reggae band. Well, they certainly weren't Bob Marley and the Wailers, but listen to "Message in a Bottle" or "Walking on the Moon" and tell me there's no reggae influence there. So we've got the reggae, and they were definitely white, so we have the accuracy down. Not sure why a bunch of Englishmen were all about the French album titles, though, but let's ignore that. Reggatta De Blanc is still pretty Good.

Zenyatta Mondatta: You can find out all manner of things on the Interweb. You can find out that Elton John's real name is Reginald Dwight. You can find out that Prince's real first name actually is Prince. You can find out things entirely unrelated to celebrities and their real names. I attempted to find out what Zenyatta Mondatta means. Apparently it means everything, and nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's a bunch of syllables that sounded good together. That's straight from an interview with Stewart Copeland. There are some theories the word Zen was intentionally incorporated, and that the Mond part is from the French word for the world, but this is really just picking it all apart. Apparently one of the suggested titles was Trimondo Blondomina, which would have been entirely too Ugly.

Ghost in the Machine: One of these names is not like the other ones, one of these names just doesn't belong. After three albums with titles that were thorougly not English, we have this one that is decidely so. Why the change? It might have had something to do with producer change to Hugh Padgham, who was also responsible forSynchronicity. It might have been that the band was shifting to more of a pop sound and felt the need to have a more accessible title. It might have been a clever pun on the fact that "Spirits in the Material World" featured a fair amount of synthesizer. It might have been something else entirely. No matter what the reason, it's a rather Bad title.

Synchronicity: According to Dictionary.com, synchronicity means "The state or fact of being synchronous or simultaneous," or "Coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related." Still confused? That definition really isn't all that helpful. Try this out — you know how in movies when a group of people is doing something that requires precise timing, and they synchronize their watches? After they do that, there exists synchronicity between their watches. Clear on what it means now? No? Well, so far as I can tell by the definition, it could be said that there is synchronicity between The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album. So why is this the title of the final, and frequently regarded as best, Police album? Frankly, I have no idea, and I didn't feel like doing any further research into this, not after all the time I spent trying to find out what Zenyatta Mondatta means. Doing that much work again would be Bad.