George Michael Tour 2008:
Live North America
Albums discussed:
Twenty Five (2008)
Patience (2004)
Songs from the Last Century (1999)
Older (1996)
TEN YEARS have passed since George Michael was arrested in a public toilet in Los Angeles and charged with public lewdness. The gossip-drunk press had fun at his expense, but Michael himself was unapologetic. In several interviews, he claimed that he had been the victim of entrapment; the undercover police officer responsible for his arrest later filed suit against him for slander. (The suit, seeking $10 million, was dismissed, then reinstated on appeal, but ultimately failed when the court ruled that, as a public official, the policeman could not legally recover damages on account of emotional distress.)
Within months of his arrest, Michael released the single “Outside,” an ode to the joy of outdoor sex, with news reports of his arrest mixed into the music. “It’s just human nature,” he sang, “getting on back to nature.” In the accompanying video, he enacted a satisfyingly vengeful turnabout, dressed as a policeman dancing in a men’s room with microphones poking out of the ceiling and urinals lining the wall. Inter-cut footage showed various couples, gay and straight, doing what comes naturally in public spaces. These couples include two male bodybuilders in a locker room, a dominatrix leading a man on a leash, and a pair of uniformed policemen kissing. Michael and Vaughan Arnell, the director of the “Outside” video, effectively satirized the puritan strain in American law and questioned the double standard surrounding gay and straight sexual display in public. In another new song, “A Moment With You,” Michael addressed the cop who arrested him: “Nothing was further from my mind than this moment with you,” he sang, “but what a way with your hands you had.”
Michael may have lost a small part of his audience after the arrest, but gay and straight fans alike turned out to see him perform on his recent tour celebrating the 25th year of his recording career. There were plenty of cheers from both in Washington, D.C., when he sang “An Easier Affair,” an upbeat embrace of sexual freedom (“I’m dancing with the freaks now; I’m having so much fun”). Introducing the song, Michael predicted, “Pretty soon boys will be able to marry boys in this country, and girls will be able to marry girls.” The crowd roared its approval. Later in the evening, when Michael dedicated his love song “Amazing” to his partner, Kenny Goss, the crowd cheered again.
Most of Michael’s material is deeper than it seems at first glance. He’s so good-looking, and the surface of his music is so polished, that people may be slow to explore the depths of his lyrics. First impressions are powerful, and Michael was still in his teens when he became successful as a member of the pop duo Wham! His later, solo material is richer and more mature. In “An Easier Affair,” he sings, “Don’t let them use my life to put your future down.” (He is presumably alluding to reports of his recent scrapes with British police; twice, he has been found sleeping in his car near cruising spots in London, and he’s been cautioned for drug possession. On another occasion, he collided with parked c
ars and drove away.) A sympathy for his audience has been present in Michael’s work from the beginning. In “Everything She Wants,” a hit with Wham!, he painted a touching portrait of an uncertain youth caught on the treadmill of a relationship he doesn’t fully understand. (“I said you were the perfect girl for me, and now we’re six months older. … I don’t know what the hell you want from me.”) He sang a truncated version of this song in Washington, without its climactic realization: “My God, I don’t even think that I love you!”
A high point of the concert was his rendering of the Police hit “Roxanne,” a love song for a prostitute, recast as a jazz ballad. Michael explained that the images projected during his performance of this song showed sex workers in Amsterdam, whom he praised for their generous participation in the filming. Apart from being extraordinarily evocative, it provided a showcase for one of the loveliest male pop voices of a generation. The bulk of the material he performed in Washington was louder, and the music’s throbbing pulse threatened to obscure that beautiful voice. Michael seemed intent on giving his audience a party, and most people in the crowd seemed to want it that way—they whistled and shouted even during quiet moments when the singer asked for silence.
“Roxanne” appears on Songs from the Last Century, Michael’s loving album of covers released in 1999. This extremely queer record, underappreciated in America, also contains “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and the Billie Holiday classic “You’ve Changed,” both sung in a vulnerable style more typical of female vocalists. In the playful “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” Michael sings, “Elizabeth Taylor is not his style, and even Ricky Martin’s smile is something he can’t see” (in the original lyric, it’s Lana Turner, not Ricky Martin). Best of all is his tremulous reading of “Wild is the Wind.” It’s hard not to be swept up by this languorous, sexy arrangement, especially when Michael pleads, “Like a leaf clings to the tree, oh my darling, cling to me, for we’re creatures of the wind, and wild is the wind.” The focus is on love, but characteristically Michael doesn’t forget about politics. He opens the disc with “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?” He gives a commanding performance of this Depression-era classic—readers are encouraged to find it on YouTube—in which the singer recalls contributing to America’s economic and military might only to end up begging for coins.
Songs from the Last Century was the first album released by Michael (apart from Ladies & Gentlemen, a career anthology) since Older, a dark masterpiece from 1996. Older is dedicated to the memory of two Brazilians, including Michael’s partner, Anselmo Feleppa, who died of an AIDS-related hemorrhage in 1993, and the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, who died in 1994. Obscure in spots—like the utterly incomprehensible sorrow it struggles to convey—Older shares with Jobim’s music its rapt quality and surface prettiness masking an underlying melancholy. Listening now to Older, it’s hard to see how anyone could have been surprised to learn the truth about Michael’s sexuality after his arrest in L.A. (He later told Oprah Winfrey that he had tried to be honest with his fans, but to avoid stirring up a reaction from journalists out of consideration for his mother.) This cinematic record’s gay content is hiding in plain sight. It opens with “Jesus to a Child,” in which the lost lover is remembered smiling beatifically, Christ-like. The singer pledges, “the love we would have made, I’ll make it for two.” In “Fastlove,” he goes cruising, hinting at his “bad luck” and noting, “In the absence of security, I made my way into the night. Stupid Cupid keeps on calling me.”
The album’s high point, “Spinning the Wheel” is surely one of the most adult pop songs ever recorded, addressing a lover who stays out all night with the words, “You’ve got a thing about danger, baby … and one of these days you’re going to bring some home to me.” The anxiety in the lyrics is set off by a lilting melody reminiscent of a circus or carnival, punctuated by Michael’s insistent “um” suggesting the thrusting of sex. The album’s nightmarish portrait of a man moving through his days in a mood of alternating numbness and terror (“Suddenly my life is like a river taking me places I don’t want to go,” he sings in “To Be Forgiven”) make it a vivid document of the AIDS era. It builds to “You Have Been Loved,” in which the singer visits the grave of his dead lover with the man’s devoutly religious mother. “If it’s God who took her son,” he sings, “He cannot be the one living in her mind.” The album’s main character—it’s hard not to assume this is Michael himself—is again able to feel sympathy for people outside himself and to note, “It’s a cruel world.”
Michael suffered another blow in 1997 with the death of his mother. He has talked in various interviews about being lost in the wilderness of grief. Patience, released in 2004, rises to intermittent brilliance. “My Mother Had a Brother,” about a gay uncle who committed suicide on the day the singer was born, becomes a gesture of remembrance for generations who suffered the kind of oppression that gay men reading this no longer have to endure. “Please Send Me Someone (Anselmo’s Song)” addresses the spirit of his dead lover, asking for “someone to love as much as I loved you.” Two other songs, “Amazing” and “American Angel,” suggest that Michael has found such a person in Kenny Goss.
On his recent tour, Michael seemed to be having a good time connecting with fans. As always, it will be interesting to see what he does next. One of a handful of previously unreleased songs on Twenty Five, the recently issued career retrospective, is “This Is Not Real Love,” a duet with Mutya Buena. More than two decades after “Everything She Wants,” Michael is still making a forceful argument for authenticity in love.
Greg Varner is former arts editor for The Washington Blade and has contributed to The Washington Post, OUT magazine, Classical Music, and other publications.
