Autore: GM Infonet

DJ Mag reflects on the legendary singer’s impact on dance music…

Words: Tom Cridland

This writer has been saddened by the apparent need to speculate on the cause of George Michael’s recent death before it is actually confirmed. This main reason for this is it is a needless waste of a wonderful opportunity to write in detail about his music.

Often, there is a grave danger that the celebrity of a star can become bigger than the art that they have created. In the weeks since George Michael’s untimely passing, too much time has been spent discussing his drug use, his sexuality and his weight — mainly in tabloid newspapers. The amazing music he wrote and performed should be focused on and celebrated instead.

It is particularly interesting to note, when looking back at his whole discography, from the Wham! days to his final singles, Michael’s huge involvement in club music that crossed over into the pop world. His consistent ability to release hit dance records throughout his career — all the way from ‘Young Guns (Go for It!)’ to 2012’s ‘White Light’, which peaked at an impressive No.15 on the UK singles chart — is commendable.

Despite what Steve Anderson and Boy George said at the time, it was extremely brave of Michael to select the latter song during his performance at the Olympics Closing Ceremony. By choosing new material over, say, a performance of ‘Faith’, he demonstrated his reluctance to coast and become a Greatest Hits jukebox. Yes, he had just released ‘White Light’ as an EP but, then again, he’d probably have profited more from increased sales of his compilations had he chosen to whip out something from the 1980s.

The fact that, till the very end of his career, Michael’s music was played in clubs is so impressive because he never had to sacrifice what he actually wanted to do artistically to write a hit single. Be it refusing to appear in the video for ‘Freedom! ’90’ or releasing 1996’s pretty much exclusively melancholic ‘Older’ record (other than, of course, ‘Star People ’97’, another of his huge dance hits, which mourned the loss of his boyfriend Anselmo to HIV/AIDS and his mother), George Michael was always his own man when it came to his music and there is no better example of how groundbreaking he was than the evolution of his dance records.

There is a tendency among snobby rock music critics to belittle Wham! but, if one compares them to some of the acts excreted by the likes of the X Factor, their sheer brilliance in creating bona fide pop classics becomes a lot clearer. Their music has, without question, also aged very well. It is not uncommon to hear the likes of ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ or ‘Club Tropicana’ at even the most edgy of dance music nights — people can pretend to like it in irony but we all know they’re lying.

George Michael’s career began with winning people in clubs over with his utterly infectious hooks and those classic Wham! records — ‘I’m Your Man’, ‘Freedom’ et al. It is often overlooked just how responsible he was for his own success — he was his own songwriter, arranger, producer, choreographer and even strategist — and how versatile his abilities were as a vocalist. The earlier dance tracks with Wham! all showcase his incredible range and tone.

On going solo with the ‘Faith’ album, however, we begin to see how creative he could be in his songwriting process — creating hit dance records whilst merging other genres. An excellent example of this is the title track to that record, which involves Bo Diddley-esque rock & roll more than anything else but is one that received more radio and dancefloor spins than anything synth-based in 1987.

The controversial ‘I Want Your Sex’ had earlier proven he was capable of building on his Wham! success with something completely different, and ‘Monkey’ was to become his first No.1 on the US Hot Dance Club Play chart. The soul-drenched No.1 smash hit duet with Aretha Franklin, ‘I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)’, however, may, in fact, be his finest upbeat work of the ‘80s.

While that decade is undoubtedly the one many consider to feature a lot of George Michael’s finest work, it was probably the ‘90s when he came into his own creatively and artistically, not just with ‘Listen Without Prejudice, Vol.1’ and the hauntingly beautiful ‘Praying For Time’ but even more so with his ability to experiment whilst creating hugely commercially successful dance hit singles.

1992’s ‘Too Funky’, recorded for the ‘Red Hot & Dance’ album to raise funds and awareness for the fight against HIV/AIDS (a project which began the demise of his relationship with Sony due to what he perceived as a lack of support from them for it), began a streak of gloriously different dance records to chart in the Top 10 on both sides of the pond. ‘Fastlove’, perhaps the most recognisable of these with its seductive slow groove and bassline, is remarkable not only because, unusually for a pop record, it doesn’t have a chorus but also because of Michael’s masterful arrangement and singing of the backing vocals, which essentially form the song’s hook.

While ‘Fastlove’ is certainly a testament to his nuanced approach to writing club music, ‘Outside’ shows his humour and strength of character with his most unashamedly camp production. A witty response to his arrest in a Beverly Hills public toilet for ‘lewd conduct’, it is also thoroughly raucous and infectious, with an immediately catchy string arrangement dominating the song’s introduction.

Michael initially touches on new territory vocally here with his extremely low delivery of “I’m think I’m done with the sofa, I think I’m done with the hall, I think I’m done with the kitchen table, baby” but he later recalls Wham! with a trademark delivery of “The game that you gave away wasn’t worth playing”. All in all, it’s a fantastic club track and an extremely funny, self-deprecating response to a scandal that you most likely would not see from a superstar of his status today.

Creating fresh upbeat material is often a challenge for vintage artists but George Michael made it look seemingly straightforward. 2004’s highly anticipated ‘Patience’ album could so easily have been a flop but instead was released to critical acclaim, while the lead single, ‘Amazing’, gave him, aged 41, his third Hot Dance Club Songs chart No.1 record. The song certainly recalled his work from the ‘80s, but it also demonstrated how he had matured as a producer with the acoustic guitar and handclaps animating the song without the need for a big Wham!-style hook.

The follow-up, ‘Flawless (Go To The City)’ also topped the dance charts and represents his finest proper electronic work, with his sublime vocals transforming the already brilliant sampling of Gary’s Gang’s ‘Keep On Dancin’’ by The Ones on their original ‘Flawless’ record.

It is actually very easy to forget, as he was such a versatile writer and singer in general, that George Michael was one of the foremost artists dealing in club music in the past 30 years. So, rather than continue to theorise on what it was that caused his hugely tragic death, I would urge any tabloid journalist who has been given such an article to write to take the day off, put on any of the songs mentioned above and enjoy a boogie round the office.

George Michael was given only 53 years in this world, but he made them count. He was still a teenager in 1982 when he began triggering worldwide endorphin-rushes as a member of Wham! Five years and a few hairstyles later, he went solo, wiggled the backside of his Levi’s on MTV and became a global sex symbol. By the time 2004 rolled around, he was staging a big comeback at age 40, and he divulged the riddle of his craft that year in the pages of British GQ: “People have always thought I wanted to be seen as a serious musician, but I didn’t, I just wanted people to know that I was absolutely serious about pop music.”
He had recently issued what would be his fifth and final studio album, “Patience,” a sensuous, sprawling meditation on sex, war, grief and commitment. Playful one moment and contemplative the next, the album seemed to give Michael an opportunity to sort out some important truths about pop itself: that our pleasure is not frivolous, and that heavy ideas travel further when they’re floating on bright melodies.
Now — after the British superstar died of heart failure in his home on Christmas Day — Michael’s legacy seems to run in poignant parallel to those of other pop gods we lost in 2016. Like Prince, he sang about the transcendental potential of human sexuality, and like David Bowie, he sought liberation through reinvention. In 1987, Michael donned an iconic leather jacket in the music video for “Faith.” Three years later, he was burning it on a coat hanger in his video for “Freedom ’90.” Fantastic.

And if freedom was what Michael was preaching in 1990, freedom is what we were hearing on “Patience” in 2004. In the years leading up to the album, he broke ranks with other zip-lipped superstars, writing and performing antiwar songs, including “Shoot the Dog,” a dance floor satire that skewered Tony Blair and George W. Bush. But in the context of “Patience,” the teasing mood of “Shoot the Dog” clashed powerfully with the album’s title track, a ballad about feeling blinkered by the war machine. Fingertips barely touching the piano, Michael asks, “Is it my imagination, or did God already leave the table?”
That’s the kind of lyric that sends you scrambling back through an artist’s songbook, searching for everything you missed the first time around. (And about that: Has there ever been an opening line more deliciously flirty than, “Well, I guess it would be nice if I could touch your body”?)

Of course, this was entirely by design. “Because I did my little bit of campaigning against the war, I had a feeling that it might make people listen a little more intently than they did before,” Michael said in a 2004 interview with MTV.
“Patience” was a bigger hit in Europe than it was in the States, so if you weren’t listening then, please listen now. You’ll hear songs about ecstatic bonds (“Amazing”), perilous romances (“Cars and Trains”), dark family secrets (“My Mother Had a Brother), courageous dream chasers (“Flawless (Go to the City)”), deceased lovers (“Please Send Me Someone (Anselmo’s Song)”) and more. It’s dizzying, just like life, and the entire thing is held together by the intimacy of Michael’s vocal delivery — that warm, sandpapery pillow-talk that could soar without warning.
Michael once said that “Patience” captured his most confident songwriting since his rookie days in Wham!, and across these songs, the man sounds more “absolutely serious about pop music” than he ever did. He also promised that it would be his last album. Nobody wanted to believe him — then or now.

Chris Richards is The Washington Post’s pop music critic.