Christmas Day delivered a shock this year that would plunge an entire generation of music lovers into sorrow: the untimely death of George Michael, 53, pop icon of the 1980s band Wham!, who went on to have a rich, melody-filled solo career that he carried forward effortlessly until the very end.
For anyone who was in school during those years, the sometimes-wistful, sometimes-irresistibly-upbeat music that Wham! and Michael created seeped through the very core of our complex, angst-ridden teenage years, and ended up defining the moods and memories of that precious, definitive era in our lives.
Along with other pop superstars of the time such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, Duran Duran, U2, Bryan Adams, Roxette, Kylie Minogue, and many more, Wham! emblazoned our reality with powerful ballads and funky dance tracks that spoke to our spirit of hopefulness in a world that seemed to be awakening to a more globally connected paradigm.
For me, it began with the high of ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’, a heel-clicking classic that surged through all of our silly “house parties,” the mix-tape cassettes that we rocked to in our cars and ultimately proved its usefulness by giving us, cocky, nervous dilettantes in the business of love and life, the courage to step onto the dance floor with our goofy moves.
What exhilaration! Wham!’s debut album, Fantastic , with its hip red cover featuring Michael and the band’s other member Andrew Ridgeley in black leather jackets — not remotely cheesy to us, of course — was etched into our consciousness. It was all the more endearing for the wild spark of rebellion that it subtly seemed to encourage through numbers such as ‘Bad Boys’, ‘Club Tropicana’, ‘Wham! Rap (Enjoy What You Do)’ and ‘Young Guns (Go For It)’.
This mattered, as it turned out, to the breed of youngsters on the cusp of the globalisation era. The Internet was not here yet in full force, but economies were opening up, and pop music was the vanguard cultural export of the West that the English-speaking youth in India and elsewhere were thirstily lapping up. Nowhere was Wham!’s role in this process more evident than in their 1985 tour of China, one of the first ever by a top pop band from the West. They played at sold-out concerts in Beijing and Guangzhou, which introduced the Anglo-Saxon music culture to China, and indeed introduced China to that world of music.
Michael’s commentary in the video documenting that trip truly reflected the newness of the situation when he said, “Although we were very privileged to have actually been put in the position we were, acting as ambassadors of a sort, I did feel totally out of place. We are musicians, we’re not politicians but I don’t think anybody had any idea of what to expect from a Chinese audience watching Wham!”
But while Wham!’s creative urge and sheer melodic genius was unstoppable during those years, it was Michael’s solos that garnered attention in the second half of the decade, particularly as he produced several groovy numbers that were so dizzyingly popular that they quickly attained cult status. These included the timeless ‘Careless Whisper’, which became a top hit in nearly 25 countries, selling about six million copies worldwide. It was rivalled in global popularity only by Wham!’s much-loved ‘Last Christmas’, whose sad irony relating to Michael’s death could not have been imagined when it was re-sung by numerous mega-stars from Billie Piper in 1999 to Ariana Grande in 2013.
Both Michael’s solo renditions and Wham!’s repertoire also began to include more broody, sometimes pining, love songs, that allowed the artistes to explore a more emotional connection with their fans.
While these songs may not have attained the skyrocketing worldwide fame of the earlier, bouncy numbers, ‘A Different Corner’, ‘Heartbeat’ and ‘One More Try’ were equally hits with what was by then a die-hard cohort of fans. When Michael broke off from Wham! in 1986 and continued to make magic with the snappy ‘Faith’, soulful ‘Father Figure’, and many more, besides collaborations with the likes of Elton John, Aretha Franklin and Mary J. Blige, it was quite obvious that the Monarch of Melody was at the peak of his powers.
That basic essence of Michael, his time-travelling gift of adaptation, improvisation, and inspiration, all the while never straying from the pulse of what his fans loved, never faded. He always hogged the limelight, for better or worse, with his stylish trimmed-beard, bad boy-looks and glitzy superstar charm, not to mention the occasional run-in with law enforcement.
Yet, at his core, he was an elemental musician gifted with powerhouse vocals and a mastery of rhythm and melody. To many of us, George Michael was the 1980s: something special, something sacred.
narayan@thehindu.co.in
