No artist has to be proud of everything they’ve done. Even if they have had massive hits and play to millions of fans around the world, there comes a point where any song has the potential to make you want to never go back on tour again or quit music altogether if it has to keep getting drilled into your head. While George Michael may have his personal least favourite tunes from his catalogue, there’s a difference between a song that didn’t work and a song that should never be heard by human ears.
Then again, Michael was never shy about making music in his early years. From the very first days of Wham, he was interested in making anything that he could with a catchy hook behind it. Not every one of them had to be an enduring classic, but listening back to some of his best material from that time, it was clear that ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ had a lot more depth than the standard fluffy pop tune.
When he hit on something like ‘Careless Whisper’, though, things started to change. No one who writes that kind of song can go back to writing music that’s merely good, and since he was already planning on going solo, a lot of Michael’s solo career was based around tunes that had a more mature angle than before.
Despite some of the songs being overly provocative and not having the best hooks, listening to him grow over the course of his solo career was far more interesting than him making another version of ‘Wham Rap’. He had to reach further than before, and listening to him get introspective on Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1, and Older was his way of playing to both of his fanbases, whether that was those who wanted to dance or wanted something a bit more heartfelt.
As Michael entered the late 1990s, though, there was some speculation as to whether he would write a song for the new millennium. Fellow teenage heartthrob Robbie Williams already had a song like that to his name, but since the world had become dominated by artists like Backstreet Boys and NSYNC towards the end of the 1990s, this would have been the perfect time for Michael to come out with a stunner.
Well, he did make an attempt, but when Michael finished with it, he realised that there was no point in releasing something that sounded that ramshackle, saying, “I started writing the song, and I thought this is gonna be really good. It was called ‘Y2K’ and I asked that they put it out on the wire that I was releasing this single or someone else is going to do it. I almost wanted to get the name under copyright, but then I finished the song, and it was crap!”
Then again, Michael’s version of crap is probably miles ahead of what other people consider the bottom of the barrel. Since he only released four core studio albums during his solo tenure, nothing was going to come out unless it was absolutely perfect, and especially for something that would be a time capsule piece like ‘Y2K’, there was a good chance that it could have come off as extremely dated before the new year had even happened.
Still, if it sounded like what Michael was working on during the Patience era, there was at least a 50/50 shot of it being good. Any chance at a new millennium ballad probably wasn’t in the cards, but if he had gone the way of Daft Punk as he had done on a song like ‘Freeek’, we might have been looking at him kicking down the door of the year 2000 in style.