Analysis: The enduring resonance of George Michael’s subversive music

Take 1990’s “Freedom!”: “I feel there’s one thing you must know / I feel it is time I advised you so / There’s one thing deep within me / There’s another person I’ve acquired to be,” Michael sings on the funky pre-hook. The obvious interpretation of “Freedom!” is that it is a rebuke of the bubblegum pop Michael had created throughout his Wham! years. However I would argue that the music’s theme of liberation operates in one other register, too — that it is a coded embrace of homosexuality: There’s another person I’ve acquired to be.

To parse the enduring resonance of Michael’s story, I spoke with James Gavin, the creator of the brand new e-book, “George Michael: A Life.” Throughout our dialog, which has been calmly edited for size and readability, we mentioned the dueling sides of Michael, the damage that the singer skilled due to homophobia and the need of empathizing with Michael in a approach that audiences solely not often did in his lifetime.

A part of what your e-book does is discover the totally different sides of George Michael — the Michael who was a “hypermacho intercourse god,” as you set it, and the Michael who was an insecure individual. How did you method that course of?

Michael spent the primary half of his life creating that character you had been simply describing (the hypermacho intercourse god), and the second half of his life destroying that character.

He reached that unimaginable pinnacle in 1988, throughout the Religion tour for the album that made him the largest pop star on this planet at the moment. That is what he’d been dreaming of for nearly his total life, and it left him depressing. That is an outdated story within the pop world: You get all the pieces you thought you needed however wind up depressing. What fascinated me, although, was the method that adopted, when Michael started by tearing down that preliminary persona after which he continued by tearing down himself.

I approached that work by speaking with greater than 200 individuals who had recognized him, typically very briefly, typically extraordinarily properly. That complete course of was like rolling a boulder up a hill. After I began on the e-book, practically everyone ignored me or mentioned no, and I feel for 2 causes. One, it was very near his loss of life, and other people had been nonetheless uncooked. And two, folks had been simply immediately suspicious, and a part of that was as a result of Michael had lived his total life in hiding. The folks round him knew that so as to keep in his good graces, they needed to maintain his secrets and techniques.

I see your biography as a part of a spate of current works in search of to reappraise our collective mistreatment of stars we claimed to like, and the psychological toll of superstar. There’s Gerrick Kennedy’s 2022 e-book, “Did not We Virtually Have It All: In Protection of Whitney Houston,” and Samantha Stark’s 2021 documentary, “Framing Britney Spears.”

You are elevating an excellent level, as a result of pop music, which is what Michael set his sights on, is ephemeral. It modifications on a regular basis, and most of the people get left behind pretty rapidly. And Michael — like several of the folks you talked about, like anybody who’s achieved what he achieved — by no means thought that it was going to go away. And it crushed him when it did.

This was actually true of Houston, too, however I feel that Michael was so in want of affection and acceptance from everyone that when his second solo album offered half as a lot as his first solo album — we’re speaking about 7.5 million copies versus round 20 million copies; 7.5 million copies is an outstanding success — he was devastated. He took it as a horrible blow, and he perceived the album virtually as a failure.

There’s additionally the unreality of life in that stratosphere. You utterly lose contact with the folks down beneath.

I additionally simply wish to say that he had an enormous coronary heart. One of many very nicest issues about Michael was the truth that he gave away hundreds of thousands of kilos to charity. At a time within the mid- to late Nineties when issues had been beginning to actually unravel for him, he stepped up his charitable contributions. And I feel that that was a self-healing gesture on his half. I feel that it was a method he felt that he may have an effect on folks’s lives first hand, past a extra summary pop star approach.

Michael endured a lot ache early on in his life and profession: the lack of his lover to AIDS, the lack of his mom. Did he ever recuperate from these losses?

No, he didn’t. He simply acquired worse and worse and worse. He felt terribly victimized, just like the world was out to get him.

A part of my e-book talks about that. There is a passage about Equality Rocks (a 2000 profit live performance for the Human Rights Marketing campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group). At this celebration of rising equality and freedom and a way of togetherness, Michael may solely look out at that crowd and see all of the ache that being homosexual had triggered him. And the monologue he gave on the live performance, it is a lengthy rant about all the pieces that had damage him in his life. He was indignant, indignant about all of it.

What would you say is lacking from our conversations about Michael?

I wrote an epilogue that I hope is extra upbeat than what precedes it, as a result of I do not wish to depart folks on a extremely down notice. I attempted to deal with the truth that any time I point out the title “George Michael” to folks, they smile. Immediately, that title brings a rush of excellent associations, they usually appear to override all of the unhappy and darkish stuff.

Additionally, you need to do your finest to attempt to empathize. I could not have advised this story if I could not discover empathy for Michael. It’s a must to in some way have the ability to put your self within the place of the individual you are writing about. If you are able to do that, you will not fall into the lure of judging. And judging is a nasty factor for a biographer to do. It is simple to have a look at somebody like Michael, who had all of it, and never really feel something for him. However I am unable to overstate the significance of empathy.