Thank you, George Michael, for the music and my glory years

2016 is a sad year for all of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. First we lost Prince, then David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and now George Michael.

Come on, he wasn't that old. Although he'd become a recluse and off the radar for the past few years, you just kind of assumed he's going to be around. 

Wham! Make it Big was one of the first original cassettes I owned or, actually, co-owned with my sister. It was a golden possession that inspired envy and I cannot tell you how many copies we made of it for our friends. The inside pull out of the album cover had all the lyrics and I knew each song (beat-for-beat, ooh-for-ooh) by heart, all the while I was failing history for not remembering names and dates.

The lives we were leading in India were highly protected and puritanical. We knew little of the outside world, and the greatest connector of our times was music. Watching a rare, sneaky music video on VHS gave us a glimpse of how the West was doing it. We devoured and aped George Michael's oversized T-shirts with sleeves rolled up, his dangling cross earring, leather jacket, his streaked blow dried hair or his brightly coloured tiny shorts and speedos (how did we not guess he was gay?). We copied it all, especially his dance moves. I think I still dance like that.

More than his style, it was what he was singing about that helped us make sense of our confused pre-pubescent world. The lyrics, "I'm never going to dance again guilty feeling has got no rhythm", was discussed and dissected — what did ‘dance’ stand for? Was it a relationship? Was it sex?

Those were simpler times, much before the Internet, and sex was considered a taboo word, leave alone an act. And there you had George singing: “If you're gonna do it, do it right — right? Do it with me.” Or even more in your face, a song that left nothing to the imagination and said it as boldly and simply as you could “I want your sex”. With lyrics that went — "sex is natural, sex is good not everybody does it but everybody should".

The songs were rebellious and spoke to us either aspirationally or exactly about what we were going through. His music grew and became more introspective as we grew. I don’t think I ever outgrew George Michael, he just stopped making that much music.

There was nothing plastic and manufactured about him, even his Wham! days which he later lamented and spoke disparagingly about was just two school friends coming together to make music and singing about having fun and not giving a damn. He had a troubled relationship with fame as all artists who achieve it so early have. By mid-90s, the camera became a burden for him and he wanted  to avoid it as much as he had courted it in the past.

In fact, that iconic video with the five supermodels (of 90s) lip-syncing the lyrics to Freedom!90 was him trying to step away from the centre stage. He was in it but not as a leading character. I watched that video repeatedly as everyone from that generation did. With Linda (Evangelista), Naomi (Campbell), Christy (Turlington), Cindy (Crawford) and Tatjana (Patitz) — it couldn't get hotter, sexier or bigger than that. And even today when you watch it, and I just did, it does not feel dated, it is so well shot, edited and produced. He was a true trendsetter.

Then when he came out to the world as homosexual. It was a huge thing. But then it didn't change how you felt about him or his music and that fact I think was even bigger at a time full of prejudices. Imagine for us in India having a gay pop icon that everyone sort of accepted because of his music, long before we were talking about homosexuality.

George Michael sold a 100 million records worldwide. For me, he and his music will transport me back to my walkman listening, rebellious, carefree youth in the flick of a button. I'm sad to say goodbye and I'm not ready to let go of that era just yet and I don't think he was either.

He was far from done. Just listen to the lyrics of his song, "White Light", from a few years ago which was about a near death experience due to pneumonia — "...this ain’t the day that it ends/ There’s no white light/ And I'm not through/ I’m alive, I'm alive/And I've got so much more/That I want to do with the music."

I know I will be playing his music again and again for some time to come. Thank you, George Michael, for the music and my glory years. RIP.

Also read: George Michael dying this Christmas is a cruel irony