George Michael: the changing man

It’s one of those British quirks that we find difficult to understand: the anxiety to see which song reaches number one during Christmas. It is an honor that mobilizes artists, marketing campaigns and betting houses. In case you didn’t know, this holiday season the winner was a song from 1984, Last Christmas by Wham!, the musical duo that introduced the world to the talent of George Michael (the other member, Andrew Ridgeley, was essentially an entertainer, with hardly any musical input of his own).

Simultaneously, a Spanish version of Careless Whispers, a biography of George Michael by Robert Steele, has just come out. Its mere existence is appreciated: there are dozens of books about the chameleon-like David Bowie, but practically nothing about an artist who carried out almost equally astonishing metamorphoses in image and sound.

And I would say for the better. The George Michael of Wham! could look like a child’s doll, with architectural hairstyles. Musically, he went from being the self-sufficient man of the early days, a whiz of machines, to working with flesh-and-blood musicians, including entire symphony orchestras. Which does not mean that he always highly valued their contributions: the book recounts some shocking gestures of stinginess with his own musicians, although he later learned to act as a philanthropist.

It is true that his stylistic turns were not as talked about as his involuntary coming out of the closet: in 1998, he was arrested in a public bathroom in California, after being provoked by a plainclothes police officer. He took it well: a few months later he launched Outside, with a memorable video that advocated exhibitionism and cottaging, besides opening with a parody of a Swedish (and heterosexual) porn film.

However, what happened in later years was not one damn bit funny. He was arrested for a similar incident in London. He was regularly caught driving under the influence of marijuana and other drugs. He got out of it by paying fines and accepting reprimands, but, finally, in 2010 he was sentenced to eight weeks in prison for being a public danger while driving, of which he served four. One might think that he (un)consciously wanted to be punished, although that does not fit with his tendency to concoct personal experiences, something that reached its climax with Bare (1990), a biographical volume written by a somewhat cynical journalist, Tony Parsons.

Hypocrisy? It is worth considering here the singer’s propensity to seek respectability, without fear of contradicting himself, as with his fleeting decision in 1990 not to appear in his own videos (as he had the money, he was replaced by Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and other supermodels). He was then at war with his record company and refusing to do any promotional work. His legal fight to get out of his contract with Sony was quixotic and did not help his career. A career in which he demonstrated a happy musical voracity, with an abundance of versions and samples of other people’s records.

There are too many unknowns surrounding Michael, including the details of his death in 2016. Unfortunately, Robert Steele’s book is limited to piecing together information that was already available. It doesn’t even explore his character as a second-generation immigrant (his birth name was Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou). It does not establish parallels with the other singer of Greek Cypriot origin who preceded him to success, Cat Stevens (Steven Demetre Georgiou), also the son of a restaurateur and who also had a stormy relationship with the world around him.

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