George Michael dying this Christmas is a cruel irony
George Michael’s “discography”, as the listicle of songs and albums is called, does not do him justice. The honeyed, risqué voice that signified both teenage rebellion and a slightly more adult interaction with the world, a bit more mature, but light and foot-tapping, and in a queer way, tugging at the heart-strings, George Michael blared from our stereos and cassette players, before we knew what he sang, what his songs meant.
George Michael is dead. He died on Christmas, December 25, 2016, yesterday, at his home in Oxfordshire, England, even as people around the world listened to him singing “Last Christmas” on YouTube. It’s something of a ritual, we all know, we all agree. But George Michael has died, and he was only 53.
It’s difficult to explain George Michael’s sway on people who haven’t grown up discovering him alongside his discovery of himself, or to people who were grown-up before the Labour-voting George Michael’s “Thacherite-looking appeal” to a socialist India broke with a few traditions.
But before there was politics, and its implications, there were young souls who were born in the 80s, found themselves in the 90s, and had George Michael to steer their rudderless hearts towards a musical ecstasy.
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| For many of us, before we knew the Beatles, we knew George Michael. |
For many of us, before we knew the Beatles, we knew George Michael. The Beatles belonged to the parents and their strange taste. There was something tinny and distant about the Beatles, something ancient and ungraspable about the Eagles, and the LPs that our parents had were always out of bounds for us.
Until George Michael freed us from the haughty, unreachable LPs, and the cassette tapes were finally our own, and George Michael a name to call our own.
The first popstar who dominates your imagination is really the first boyfriend, because he’s the boy you spend your meagre pocket money on. And the after-school hours, in your room with no TV or phone, he would talk to you.
I didn’t know George Michael’s real name for a very long time. Sometime in the mid-2000s, while reading about his anti-Iraq War stance, did I come across his name: Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou. He had a Greek-Cypriot father and an English mother, and he was born in London, in 1963.
I promptly forgot that Grecian name again, and perhaps today, waking up to a news that made me numb-eyed in bed and made memories of my 90s come flashing back, did I come across that name once more.
“Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”, “Last Christmas”, (I had heard “Club Tropicana” much, much later, on a day I was randomly YouTubing, sometime after discovering Michael’s Grecian real name) from Wham!, George Michael’s band with Andrew Ridgeley that was disbanded, and Michael’s first solo album Faith, literally ushered us in to our independent musical kingdoms.
As I knew it, there were hand-me-down recorded cassettes with a selection of songs, cassettes without a cover image and with the hand-written scrawls of song names on their ruled-lined covers.
The very first one I had as a gift from an older, generous cousin, had in it “Careless Whisper”, “Faith”, “Last Christmas”, among songs by others. This was in the early 90s, and Faith, the blockbuster of George Michael’s first solo album had come out in 1987. I was already five-six years behind in catching up.
It is said that George Michael was the “most played artist” between the period 1984-2004 in the United Kingdom, even though Michael had expressed his disenchantment with the usual vagaries of pop music culture quite early on.
Since I’m neither into musical trivia, nor can neatly stack the songs in the albums of their origin, it was always the individual song itself, and George Michael’s unique, prelapsarian temptation of a voice, that informed my deep attachment to him and his songs.
“Freedom! ‘90”, “One More Try”, “Cowboys and Angels”, “Father Figure”, “Jesus To A Child”, “I Want Your Sex”, “Let’s Go Outside”, “Fast Love”, “Spin The Wheel” - each and every song has stayed with me forever, like conversations with an old friend you recall from time to time, that you fall back on.
The duets with Elton John and Aretha Franklin – “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”, and “I Knew You Were Waiting For Me” respectively, are powerful songs in themselves, and indicative how fellow musicians and vocalists loved working with George Michael.
When “sexuality” became an issue, and the arrest over “lewd public bahaviour” happened, in India we still hadn’t even started the conversation around homosexuality. But as George Michael “came out” as gay, while we didn’t quite know what to make of it, we also knew that he had done something bold and right and courageous, and must be respected for that.
Even as no one could really talk about it, as we still did not have the language or the grammar to talk about exactly what had happened, the boys made homophobic jokes as if they were let down by an icon they had made much of, before moving on to more “male” singers and bands.
When MTV came to India and when colour television flooded our drawing rooms, George Michael’s cross earring would become one of the definitive symbols of a more sexually-charged, confused and utterly wondrous times. Around this time, boys started piercing their ears, wore studs.
Pop music was both liberation, and the culture we could call our own, not a mere legacy.
And as we moved on to songs that were “more meaningful”, as we discovered British and classic rock, George Michael receded a little bit to the background, but the deep connection stayed. He was the first whom, we, the children of the 80’s, always remembered. Eclipsing the other Michael – Jackson – quite a bit, if not completely.
George Michael’s opposition to Iraq War and his public support for LGBTQ rights have turned him into a poster-boy for left-liberal politics, and solidified his reputation in not just the United Kingdom, but the world over. He was always a little ahead of his time, a little melancholy despite the heights of fame he had seen so early on in his career.
From a teenybopper heartthrob, George Michael reinvented himself with songs that were introspective, almost spiritual with their message of patience and healing. But he was equally contemptuous of sexual morality, and after he came out, he confessed to feeling “fraudulent” about his sexual and public life.
UK tabloids have had a love-hate relationship with George Michael, reporting on drug habits, arrest, and other close brushes with law, but the singer always rose above the controversies, while being strongly supported by a loyal fan base and his fellow artists who couldn’t not swear by his huge heart, honesty and generosity.
Every one of my close friends has/has had the ubiquitous “Collected George Michael”, “The Best of George Michael” – compilations mostly. Perhaps someone still has the cassette of Faith, the 1987 album. Just how precious is that now, even though we don’t have the cassette tape players to listen to it.
Rest in peace, George Michael. You were the English boy who made Christmas cooler. Now the careless whispers are all we are left with.