Sting – Little Wing
Go on – admit it: you’ve done it too.
You quickly glanced around to check no-one else is in the room, grabbed your imaginary guitar and silently howled along to Jimi Hendrix‘s Little Wing, lost in a moment of true beauty.
And by doing this, you share something – not much – but something, with Sting. And Sting, as we know, is a man with a mission.
When he focussed his sights on Little Wing, his mission was to take one of the most acutely perfect rock moments and saturate it so heavily with MOR tedium that to listen to the song is to experience the sensation of drowning in grey tapioca.
Little Wing was 2 minutes 45 seconds long. Sting’s is nearly 9 minutes in length. How – where – did he find the extra 6 minutes? What did he think he could add that Jimi Hendrix didn’t?
He sings the song twice. Only the most rampant of idiot egos could deem a whole song to only be truly useful as a verse.
And just feast on what other overwhelmingly drab morsels Sting managed to cram into this 3-minute pop song sprawling, heinous rock-odyssey:
- An entirely anonymous scat-blues Stevie Wonder-lite keyboard solo;
- Blisteringly generic guitar solos that manages to suck out any remaining traces of emotion;
- An oboe solo that is forgotten the second the last Kenny G-esque note ends;
- Most astonishingly of all, a crowbarred-segue into All You Need Is Love. By The Beatles. That one.
After watching the video, you’ll be exhausted.
Here, Little Wing is subjected to the same over-rich over-stuffing as the Gluttony victim in Se7en. And so here, you will mourn Little Wing‘s passing. But most of all, you’ll want to cut off Sting‘s stupid ratty pony tail.
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