I lived in the Washington DC area and watched George Michael all of the time. When he came to the DC market, his “schtick“ was video clips - his sports segment was longer than his competitors and he aired far more video. With Jim Vance as the anchor & Bob Ryan as the weatherman, WRC News 4 was DC’s #1 local news program during the 1980s
George spent the vast majority of his career as the sports guy on the DC NBC affiliate, WRC 4. That's where he launched "Sports Final" in 1980. The show didn't go national - and get a name change - until a few years later. I always hated the name "Sports Machine" and refused to call it anything but "Sports Final"! I never much liked George on WRC 4 either, mainly because he ran a lot of pro wrestling clips!
Oh, I disagree with this entirely. I don't think anyone viewed GM as anything like Boy George. GM might've been "pretty", but he was still clearly a male, whereas BG played with gender and androgyny in a much more active/provocative way. No one saw GM and wondered if he was male or female, whereas BG inspired that confusion. Also, "Waking" tanked because it simply wasn't very good. If CC had come back with another album as good as "Colour", I suspect it'd have done very well, competition with Wham! or not...
There've always been plenty of straight males who were not especially masculine. GM is far from the most extreme example of a supposedly effeminate pop star of the era. What %age of fans looked at Nick Rhodes and assumed he was gay? Much higher than the %age for GM! Geez, who had "100% heterosexual" on their bingo card for this guy 35 years ago?
I'm sure someone did! It's like Danny from NKOTB. Dude looks like Frankenstein's monster, but there's that tiny sliver of fans who gravitate to him! Ridgeley attracted the fans who figured he was more accessible since the heavy majority liked GM!
I remember Boy George tried to claim he was asexual for a while. Not sure when he formally came out as gay, but circa 1984 or so, I think he tried to pretend he wasn't interested in sex period. It was easier for musicians to be openly gay in the 80s than actors, but it was still a tough path to follow if you wanted to appeal to the masses. Cripes, Elton John married a woman in 1984 rather than admit it!
We've always tended to be oblivious in the States. As mentioned, there's Liberace, the most flamboyant, "gay seeming" musician you can imagine - and yet people thought he was straight. Suburban moms all over the US happily sang along with "YMCA" and "In the Navy" without the slightest understanding that they were (mostly) gay...
"Go-go" not only isn't the best song on "MIB", it's not even the best Motown-inspired song on "MIB", as "Freedom" blows it out of the water. Even though we clueless hetero Americans may not have realized GM was gay, we did see the song as "super-fruity", like you say. Though more because it was such overt bubblegum and had so many annoying elements. The "go-go" part, the "jitterbug" bits, etc. It'd be a better song with less idiotic lyrics...
Make It Big is a great album. It's a bit like Colour By Numbers in that there really isn't a dud cut on it - it certainly isn't packed with garbage filler. I got it ultra-cheap as part of a 3-CD pack of Wham's albums in cardboard vinyl sleeve reproductions last time I was in Berlin at Saturn, sort of Germany's version of BestBuy only 100 times nicer. I'm not a huge Wham! fan but thought, "Why the heck not at $8" or whatever, and I was not disappointed. Musically? They were staking out virtually identical spaces - a little dance, a little Motown revisionism, a little sophistipop. Culture Club had more of the reggae thing, whereas Wham! leaned more on rap. Both were equally incongruous, but that certainly didn't stop the public from gobbling the records up. Visually the two were nothing alike, but that wasn't the point I made.
To be fair, I think GM wasn't a natural dancer. I see that more as an awkward attempt to dance by a guy whose talents don't lie in that vein more than "George Michael's 'Look At Me' - I'm a gay boy!" dance...
My longtime best friend was gay but didn't come out to me until we were 19. When we were 18, he dated my other best friend for about 2 months. 6 months after they split up, she told me she thought he was gay because of the way he kissed - she claimed it was like kissing her brother. I argued she was wrong - he'd just bought a "Penthouse" the prior day! 6 months later... turns out she was right! But she obviously didn't have a good enough "gaydar" to figure out Kevin's sexual orientation without kissing him!
Agree. I like "Go-go" more now than I did 36 years ago, but even when I succumbed to the charms of Wham! in summer 1985 - 99% due to the irresistible "Freedom" - I never loved "Go-go". I liked it okay, but it was definitely weaker than much of the rest of the album. Better than the stuff on the debut, though. I never took to that album...
The debut is so astoundingly camp in hindsight that I kind of enjoy it in a "laugh along with the con" sort of way. Like, I admire the audaciousness of the thing.
You referred to GM's "prettiness", so I thought that opened up the comparisons to visual domains. Anyway, yes, they had musical similarities, though Wham! leaned more bright 'n' perky for the most part. CC had a more melancholy vibe to their stuff, IMO. BG had a duskier voice - not as strong a natural singer as GM, but I thought his vocals had more personality. Still feel the failure of "Waking Up..." had nothing to do with the notion that Wham! co-opted CC's cultural spot. The charts were big enough for 2 semi-similar bands. If CC continued to make good music, it would've sold...
Yeah, the leather boys thing seems ridiculously "gay" now. We just didn't tune in to that stuff back then as much!
So I spun I Feel For You off Spotify this morning and yeah, it's kind of a mess. But I think I like it more now than I did in 1990. It's gone from dated to nostalgic. Still, I feel like a little Chaka goes a long way, and there's a lotta Chaka in full on scream mode on this record. The title cut saves that stuff for emphasis, where it works beautifully. Some of the rest of the record is similarly structured, which is great, but when it goes overboard it's like needles in my ears... Private Dancer it ain't, but it's not a bad record by any means. I should probably spin it again. I will say, the title cut I think just blows away everything else on the record, just as I remembered, even tho several cuts share similar production. It feels most inspired on "I Feel For You" though.
I think George Michael's beauty gave Wham! a weapon Culture Club didn't really have. In a contest where two bands are running around on the same musical playground, the advantage goes to the one that's hot. Agree that Boy George is probably an underrated vocalist. George Michael could just do things Boy George couldn't. We'll see that more later on... I think Culture Club would have seen more chart traction without the competition from Wham!. I don't think Waking Up would have performed as well as its predecessors, but I'm not sure it would have collapsed so badly, either. There were also other acts out there by this point running around on the same playground. We should probably do a full Top 40 review - it's likely one or two songs from the same school of pop will crop up.
Sure it was! It didn't pretend to be anything more than that. The early 80s were full of bubblegum pop.
Luther Vandross didn't start admitting it until around 1987, or so, even though everyone in the industry knew it.
I remember reading during the "Listen Without Prejudice" days that GM said he kept dropping hints to the public about what he was and a lot of people still didn't pick up on it. That's why he said he was kind of relieved when he got busted in a restroom stall trying to pick up men.
I never liked "Freedom". I prefer Go-Go". Actually, I like the next album even more. We'll get to it in about a year.
