Stewart's irony
I would like to make some considerations about Stewart’s wit. I guess you all have visited the interviews page, so you have certainly realized what a brilliant and sometimes funny speaker Stewart is. He is no doubt a man of great wit and this is recognizable, of course, in his songs too. Let’s examine some of them.
In most of the songs written by Stewart for The Police his irony leaps out at the listener. Irony, however, gives a double meaning to the words or the statements uttered because the speaker who uses it is thinking of a double audience: the people who will immediately understand the real meaning of the message and the ones who will misunderstand it. The speaker employs a sort of “double talk” because s/he relies not only on the target’s linguistic competences, but above all on a shared patrimony of knowledge.
The two songs written by Stewart for Reggatta De Blanc deal with a man’s daily problems. Both On Any Other Day and Does Everyone Stare are in first person narrative, with a large use of descriptive language, which helps the listener to imagine the situation: