Welcome, dear readers, to another edition of “increasingly older man points out how today’s pop music sounds quite a lot like the stuff of his youth”.

Which, I guess, is better than “old man shouts at clouds about how pop music sucks today compared to when he was a kid, not realizing that he’s really not the target market“.

Today, we’re going to talk about Gotye, (which I finally learned is more-or-less pronounced “Goat-tee-ay”, which is derived from “Gauthier”, which is the french version of the Belgian artist’s name, “Wouter”, which could be anglicized as “Walter”, though he goes by “Wally”). Specifically, the song “Somebody That I Used to Know”, which was first released in the States back in January 2012.

This song started popping up on my pop radar a few months back. I kind of enjoyed it; it has a nice ethereal quality and a pleasing arrangement that set it apart from the rest of the stuff surrounding it on the top 40 radio playlist.

It also sounded a lot like the Police. So much like the Police that one could probably get some traction starting an urban legend that it was actually a leftover track from the Outlandos d’Amour sessions in ’78

Everything from the vocal inflections (Gotye sounds very much like Police-era Sting) to the reggae-styled beat to the guitar lines (not as trebly and staccato as typical Andy Summers, but still Summers-esque) suggests a calculated retro vibe, and a definite Police influence.

It seems that the influence drawn most specifically from “Can’t Stand Losing You”:

Same key, almost the same beat and tempo; even the vaguely comparable subject matter of a failing love affair. The similarities are pretty uncanny.

And I’m not the only one who noticed. This post from Lost Things Found hits the issue with a bit more specificity than I touch on here and is totally worth a read. Also, somebody with much more creative skill than I possess made this excellent mash-up of the two tunes that catches the essence of both in a package that’s totally listenable on it’s own:

Mostly, I just wanted to say that “I think that this song sounds like The Police” somewhere other than my car, after which my teenage kid starts with the eye rolling. And yes, it took me over four hundred words to do it, but those words, and the critique and analysis that came along with them. are (at least) half the fun of music appreciation, isn’t it?