George Michael “Patience”
In late Spring of 1987, six years after the disease was first referenced by the Center for Disease Control, after it had already claimed the lives of forty thousand Americans, Ronald Reagan announced the launch of the Presidential Commission on A.I.D.S. It marked the first time that he’d publicly uttered those four letters. Thirteen at the time and flooded with hormones, I was too young to be at risk for any sexually transmitted disease. But at the same time, alongside baseball statistics and baseball cards, sex was pretty much all I could think about. And I had questions — lots of questions. Like, when will it happen? What will it feel like? Who will it be with? And — most of all — will it really kill me?
Which is to say that my sexual coming of age occurred during the most terrifyingly anti-sex moment in recent American history. My generation was given a choice — pursue your urges or preserve your life. And so, I spent countless hours over several years, alone in my bedroom, contemplating that devil’s bargain, fantasizing about romances that would never happen, chastening my thoughts with the help of Z-100. “Alone” by Heart followed by Whitney’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” followed by Wang Chung’s “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” followed by Debbie Gibson’s “Only In My Dreams” and capped by U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The radio confirmed what I already feared slash assumed: That we are all alone. That if we are lucky, we can have some PG-rated fun. And that, while fantasies are fine, physical fulfillment is necessarily — for the sake of our collective well being — elusive.
To say the very least, it was a confusing to the point of frightening time — a battle between my screaming teenage biology and the universe telling me to shut it right up. But then, just weeks before Reagan arrived late to the funeral, smack in the middle of a global epidemic, amid my own angst and innocence, booming from radios all around the world, came a bass line round as a derriere, a beat that slapped like leather on skin and a synth hook that could make Prince blush. It sounded absolutely nothing like Heart or Whitney or Wang Chung or Debbie Gibson or U2. And though it also sounded nothing like “Careless Whisper” or “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go,” thirty seconds into the song — right after he grunted “there’s things that you guess” — I realized that I was, in fact, listening to a song by George Michael.
“I Want Your Sex” was unfathomable. It was unfathomable that such a brazenly, sex positive song could take over the airwaves during a time wherein sexual caution bordered on repression. It was unfathomable that one half of an unserious boy duo who’d grown some facial hair and released a massive, and massively romantic, but still not entirely serious (in the way that I assumed U2 and The Police were) ballad, could have made this gender and genre bending turn. But most of all, it was unfathomable that everyone loved this song. And by everyone, I mostly mean thirteen year old girls.
In the exact opposite way that 1987 was the year that I heard Ronald Reagan say “A.I.D.S.,” 1987 was also the year that I heard girls in my class say the words “I Want Your Sex.” Oh my god where to start. To be a teenage boy with thoughts of teenage girls and then to see those teenage girls dancing and singing along to George Michael in the time of A.I.D.S. was more than many of us could handle. First, for my entire life until the time I heard this song at a middle school dance. I really had no idea that teenage girls wanted anything to do with sex. Second, I still wasn’t so sure that I was right about the first thing. Because, what did the song even mean? Did “sex” refer to the act, or to an organ or some less specific but obviously enticing energy or pheromone that I hoped I was giving off but was fairly certain I was not? And third, was this even really George Michael? At some points during the song, he did sound like the guy from Wham!. But other times, like when he grunted, he sounded like Rick James. And when he squealed he sounded like Prince. But also, when he pitched up and then doubled up his falsetto he sounded less like Prince and more like Vanity or Apollonia. The deejay said it was George Michael but I was not so sure.
None of it made any sense. And yet, nothing has ever made more profound sense than George Michael singing “I Want Your Sex” in 1987. Michael was the horny canary in the coal mine, singing for gay men and women, straight men and women and, though we didn’t have the right pronouns or adjectives in 1987, everyone left, right and in between. “I Want Your Sex” was a Pop smash, a dance floor banger and an anthem for sex positivity in the face of fear and suppression. In retrospect, that it came out in 1987, weeks from Reagan’s announcement, makes almost too much sense. At the time however, that George Michael — that tan, bleached blonde teen idol — was the song’s writer and performer seemed preposterous.
Up until that point, I had assumed that, just like me, George Michael fantasized about making out with girls. After all, the George Michael I knew was constantly surrounded by girls. Swarms of girls in those Wham! videos and on MTV News. And then, beginning with the “Careless Whisper” video, when he’s pulled below deck by a seductress in a white one piece, with a plunging neckline and (importantly) a giant black belt (it was 1987), he was surrounded by girls and women. It would be another decade before the singer was outed, arrested for “engaging in a lewd act” and ultimately reclaimed his public image as a proud gay man. All of which is to say that the intentionally vague, gender-bending aspect of “I Want Your Sex” did confuse me. But even then, before I knew anything about sexuality, I intuited that “I Want Your Sex” was not entirely straight.
More than its brazen defiance of caution and more than its sexual fluidity, what startled me most about “I Want Your Sex” and what startled me most about George Michael was the leap that he made between Wham! and “Faith.” When I thought about Wham! and I suspect when many people think about the band, I thought about “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” I thought of teenage George and Andrew. Of two adorable teen English boys singing and rapping and color coordinating and making bubblegum. And while most of that was true, those broad dayglo strokes obscured what was happening beneath the surface. Whereas when they started out Andrew was more musically proficient than his best friend and bandmate, by 1984 George had ascended. “Everything She Wants” and “Freedom,” from “Make it Big,” were closer to Blue Eyed Soul than to Bubblegum. And the coda to “Make it Big,” a song credited to “Wham! Featuring George Michael,” represented a quantum leap for an artist who, by most accounts, had no formal musical training, could not read or write music and who could only barely play piano.
“Careless Whisper” was a track that George and Andrew had been tinkering with for years. But ultimately it was George’s baby. As Andrew was bumping into the ceiling of his own talent and ambition, George was obsessing, working and growing. The product of all that blood, sweat and tears — the pièce de résistance — was “Careless Whisper,” a ballad so sultry and soulful that it was hard to square with everything else Wham! had made previously. “Careless Whisper” was the end of Wham! and the beginning of George Michael.
Nevertheless, in 1984, “Careless Whisper” could have been considered a fluke — a very good song, sung by an even better singer, dressed up in the studio by an undeniable sax solo and a bevy of hired guns. But obviously, it was no fluke. It was a sign of things to come. And three years later, with “Faith,” Michael took another, even bigger leap forward. His solo debut is among the most successful Pop albums of all time — producing four number one hits in the U.S., winning the Grammy for Album of the Year and selling over twenty-five million copies worldwide. “Faith” confirmed not only that George Michael had graduated from Bubblegum, but that he needed to be taken very seriously, alongside Michael, Prince and Madonna as a world defining Pop Star.
Like his iconic peers, George was young, telegenic and genre curious. His songs could work on Pop radio as much as they could work on dance floors. His market was ostensibly anyone age zero to fifty. Like Michael, Prince and Madonna, he was an MTV darling and he was tabloid catnip. But also, he was nothing like that unholy trinity. Unlike Prince, George could scarcely play an instrument. Unlike Michael, he was not a childhood prodigy. And unlike Madonna, he was — well — not Madonna. It would also be fair to say that George possessed a knack for earnest candor that his peers lacked. When he sang, and unlike Michael, Prince and Madonna, you believed every word he said. But the two things that most separated George from the pack were that (1) he worked alone and (2) he worked extremely slowly.
Prince had (among many others) The Revolution and The Time and The New Power Generation. Michael had his brothers and Quincy Jones and, eventually, every high end Pop and R&B producer that money could buy. Madonna’s had Shep Pettibone, William Orbit, "Jellybean" Benitez, Reggie Lewis and Patrick Leonard. Until he turned twenty, George Michael had his best friend, Andrew Ridgley. But after Andrew he had…no one else. He wrote alone and, more often than not, he produced his albums alone. Which might not be so shocking were it not for the facts that he could (a) not technically read or write music or (b) play any instrument beyond a rudimentary level.
The quantum leap between “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” and “Careless Whisper” is patently breathtaking. In sports, the equivalent might be Mike Piazza, who was selected in the sixty-second round (not a typo) of the 1988 amateur draft (as a favor to his Dodgers’ manager Tom Lasorda) and who was considered a no future prospect until — five years later — he was on his way to becoming the greatest power-hitting catcher in baseball history. Piazza’s growth was non-linear. It was not evolution, but rather disruption. The jump from Wham! to “Faith” was equally unpredictable.
While his growth was uncanny, what most distinguished George Michael was the pace at which he worked. Between 1987, when he released “Faith,” and 2016, when he tragically passed away, he put out five studio albums — four of which consisted of originals and one which was an album of covers. In total, that averages out to about one album of new material every seven and a half years and two original compositions per year. No Pop star has ever worked so slowly and deliberately as George Michael. His limited output could, of course, be attributed to contract disputes, personal tragedy, public scandal and, ultimately, declining health. But those headlines obscure a deeper truth — George was a perfectionist who frequently struggled with writer’s block and who obsessed over every detail of every note and every word of every song.
If his pace was historically slow, his departure was virtually unprecedented. With the exception of a couple of modest singles and retreads, George stopped releasing new music after 2004. There were greatest hits packages and live albums and tours, of course, But for the most part, George Michael stopped recording at the age of forty-one. That fact places him on a very short list of artists, including Bill Withers and Kate Bush, who stopped making music while they were still extremely viable Pop stars.
Michael’s legacy, meanwhile, is easier to place. Without him, there’s no Jamiroquai or Pharrell or — obviously — Justin Timberlake. But while the line between George Michael and J.T. is straight and plain to see and while J.T.’s discography is similarly spare, it may be another American Justin who’s a better comparison. Justin Vernon — aka Bon Iver (really the name of a band but also synonymous with its founder and leader) — is an artist originally known for deeply personal, confessional music, written and recorded alone, who transitioned into more electronic realms, but who has become famous for his slow and labored output. Without George Michael, there’s no Justin Timberlake. But I’d suggest that it’s really Justin Vernon — whose arrival was marked by musical heartbreak and who then slowly toiled in the musical realm between personal and ambient— who better explains George Michael.
Both George Michael and Justin Vernon produced debut albums that made an indelible impact on me (“Faith” and “For Emma Forever Ago”) and both failed to keep my attention thereafter. To be clear, this is not an indictment of their careers, no is it to suggest that those follow-ups lacked luster. It is instead to state the obvious: that there is inevitable churn in your fanbase when you only put out records every five to ten years. In both cases — George and Justin — I never made it past the second album. Which means that I’ve never heard Vernon’s jammy, hippie-hoppie experiments. And, likewise, that I’d never heard “Older” George Michael, never heard his cover record and knew nothing about his swan song, “Patience.”
“Older” was released in 1996, six years after “Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1,” and three years after the death of his Michael’s, Anselmo Feleppa. A moodier, jazzier, and (understandably) darker record than his fans had come to expect, it underwhelmed both commercially and critically. Then, on the heels of that regression, Michael was arrested in 1998 for “public lewdness,” functionally annulling most of his popularity in the U.S. market. From that point on, and though he continued to thrive globally, George Michael was merely a very famous name who sold modestly in America. “Patience” arrived firmly in that aftermath, at a time when Michael was beginning to dig himself out from depression and writer’s block and was required to re-introduce himself to a country where he’d once been certified Platinum and Diamond.
If “Older” was considered something of a disappointment in The States, “Patience,” (from 2004) was practically a non-event. Whereas every previous album of George Michael originals had produced at least two top forty hits in America, “Patience” yielded none. Whereas he sold eight times as many copies of “Faith” in the U.S. than in the U.K., he sold half as many copies of “Patience” stateside. As part of its long gestation, the first two singles — ”Freek! 04” and “Shoot the Dog” were already two years old by the time of “Patience's” arrival. Moreover, some combination of Michael’s sexuality, his dormant periods and his anti-war stance had soured large swaths of the U.S. market.
As a result, “Patience” was much more an album for aging diehards than it was a triumphant return. Like all George Michael albums, it is an extremely personal one. But given his middle age, his strident politics and his proudly open sexuality, it is also an extremely honest album. Prince employed characters and double entendres. Michael Jackson used masks. And Madonna had her costumes. But there was always a sense that the voice of George Michael was his actual voice — that he was telling you the absolute truth. That what we were hearing was not a “version of George Michael,” but the man himself. That the signifier was the signified.
Obviously, that could be entirely true. Obviously, so much remained hidden. Obviously we projected so much of ourselves onto our hero. And yet, when George sang about his “Amazing,” “American Angel,” Kenny, we were fully convinced of their abiding love. We believed that, when George was at his lowest moment, Kenny saved him. We believed that Kenny understood George, that he accepted George the way he was — necessarily public but deeply private, wholly devoted but physically promiscuous, prone to the highest highs and lowest lows. We made these conclusions not on the basis of gossip or press but from George’s music. It was all right there in his voice and his words.
“Patience” unfolds like a non-linear musical about the life of George Michael, but reimagined as a soundtrack for MIami boutique hotel pools. “Round Here” is a patently lovely origin story about childhood with Andy in North London, dreaming about and escaping to the action. “My Mother Had a Brother” is a naked ballad about George’s uncle, who was almost certainly a closeted gay man, and who committed suicide the day after his nephew was born. “Cars and Trains” is an unusually upbeat dance-pop number about escape and death. "John and Elvis Are Dead" is more experimental dance-pop about religion and death. And "Please Send Me Someone (Anselmo's Song)" is about love, loss and (you guessed it) death.
The love and death on “Patience” are very real — they are true events. But also, they are plot devices that help tell the story of a man who once was lost but now is found. And the version of himself that George discovers on the other side of the mountain is funky, freaky and outspoken. Yes, he sounds like the artists he would spawn — J.T., Jamiroquai and Pharrell. But, more so, he sounds like those Pitchfork darlings of the Aughts that he’s almost never compared with — Animal Collective and LCD Soundsystem. Not always. Not entirely. But enough to notice.
Musically, this album was ahead of its time. The beats slapped a little harder. The hooks are more restrained and less expected. He sounds nothing like Avey Tare, Panda Bear or James Murphy. But his tracks are much closer to theirs than to his ostensible peers, or to Timbaland’s or The Neptunes’. Though it took forever to arrive, and though its breadth is sprawling, “Patience” is also very clearly, consistently and directly from the source. It’s obsessed over but it’s also uncut. It may not be a masterpiece but it’s both masterful and a statement of purpose.
Like Prince and M.J., George Michael did not survive his fifties. After “Patience,” he announced that he was done making albums. At the time, I didn’t think much of his proclamation. I dismissed it as either offhanded hyperbole or an out of context, clickbaiting headline. I assumed that, even if MP3s had rendered CDs obsolete and even if the album format was dead, surely we’d have many years — decades even — of music from George Michael to look forward to. But, tragically, I was wrong. Tours followed. Another live album. A smattering of duets and one off singles. But no more albums. “Patience” was it — a Platinum album all across Europe but a non-event in America. Thirty-two years after he released “Last Christmas” with Wham! and was the face of “Do They Know it’s Christmas” with Band Aid, George Michael died on Christmas Day 2016. Today, eight years since he’s been gone, you might conclude that he could have, should have made more music. That the tragedy is that he didn’t give us enough. And you’d be right — except for the fact that he gave us everything.