George Michael was never concerned with being exclusively rock and roll throughout his career. Going through his studio output, he was the definition of what a pop star should aim for, but he also had subtle dips into genres like soul and R&B whenever he got the chance, regardless of whether it was considered the “en vogue” thing to do. Michael was still an avid fan of all things rock, and when talking about his influences, he considered David Bowie to be the closest thing to a deity in the genre.
It’s not like Bowie would have denied this kind of claim. No one who makes a conceptual masterpiece about descending upon the Earth to warn the world it only has five years to live and that he is its holy messiah is bound to have a high level of confidence in what direction they are taking their music in before they even open their mouth.
When looking at Bowie’s work, he was never keen to stay in one style for very long. As opposed to the glam icon that most people knew, Michael first got turned on to Bowie when he worked with Brian Eno on his Berlin trilogy of albums like Low and “Heroes”. This wasn’t the sound of ‘The Starman’ stuck in his ways; this was him toying with his sound and trying his best to find some sort of middle ground between his pop self and his avant-garde side.
Once Michael had gone solo, he had to be asking himself the same questions as well. The kind of teenybopper audience that he built up with Wham wasn’t exactly going to be willing to make a massive jump into experimental territory, but when Michael found the right idea by breaking out the beard and the James Dean coat for Faith, he had another persona that worked just as well as ‘Ziggy Stardust’ had.
Then again, there were bound to be limits on where Michael could go as a solo artist. He was still interested in messing with any genre that seemed to fit with his voice, but even though ‘Freeek’ in 2004 was a worthy piece of electronic rock, it’s nowhere near on the same level as what Bowie had done years before on Earthling.
Michael was only looking to take inspiration from Bowie, and as far as he could tell, he was never going to compete with a musical juggernaut like him, saying, “I just thought Bowie was this otherworldly god and I just knew it was absolutely genius music. But I never thought of him as influencing me, I always knew he was over there. But of course, he wasn’t really because the bits that really applied to me did influence me: ‘Golden Years’ and what was the other big one? ‘Fame’, things like that.”
But trying to purge Bowie as a musical influence is like saying that you only flirt with the idea of breathing air. If anyone has ever dared to think outside the box with their craft in the last 50 years, they have most likely taken a page out of Bowie’s playbook without really knowing it, whether that’s with his presentation or constant love of going against the grain.
The masses were bound to love Michael no matter what kind of musical costume he tried on, but loving Bowie wasn’t a matter of him trying to imitate ‘The Thin White Duke’. It was about taking that same bravery that the rock icon had and applying it to every record he made afterwards.