Most pop stars understand the power of the formula, but great pop stars know how to factor in just the right amount of charisma to maintain relevance. George Michael might have gotten his start as a cog in the broader pop scene, but his confidence and tenacity when faced with some of the industry’s more brutal qualities made him stand out as someone whose music was a true sign of the times.
Michael was one of the few figures who understood the highs and lows of being viewed a certain way by audiences and the media—in the beginning, he brought talent and sex appeal to Wham!, the kind that endeared everyone and tapped into the sort of unattainable charm that set the stage for a career that would consistently pinball between adoration and scrutiny, regardless of how much he tried to control it.
When Michael went solo, his popularity surged to new heights, but suddenly he was polarising in his ubiquity and vulnerable to a world that didn’t yet know how much of a threat being open and confident could be. As the years went by, the focus on churning out hits became much more complicated as Michael came to terms with the nature of life in the spotlight and being comfortable in his own skin.
To him, being a hitmaker was one thing, but experiencing happiness in celebrity was another. Often, the two overlapped, and sometimes, they couldn’t be further apart. “I watch people who are not driven by creativity any more, and I think how dull it must be to produce the same kind of thing,” he once told The Guardian. “If you don’t feel you’re reaching something new, then don’t do it. I think there are things about my journey that might be useful to other people, and coming up with a hit record on its own doesn’t seem to be enough any more.”
However, Michael was a hitmaker, amongst many other things, but making songs that dominated charts was something he managed to do over and over again, and it’s likely that the first time some of his biggest hits played on the radio, listeners could hear it too. It’s hard to imagine ever hearing something like ‘Careless Whisper’ for the first time, or ‘Faith’ or ‘Freedom’, but it’s likely that that first exposure held that indescribable familiarity that categorises many instant classics, now and then.
This is a gift Michael possessed himself when it came to hearing the music of others. As someone with the formula so hard-wired into his mind, when he heard a song, he could hazard a good guess about whether it would become a chart-topper. Although he preferred other songs by The Human League, the moment he heard ‘Don’t You Want Me’ for the first time, it set off alarm bells.
The Human League weren’t experiencing the easiest of journeys at the time, especially not when it came to breaking America before the release of ‘Don’t You Want Me’, but something about that song hit timeless pop convention more than anything they could have ever put out, catching Michael’s attention immediately when it first crossed his path. “This is going to be fucking massive,” he recalled being his reaction, taken aback by how “symmetrical and poppy” it was.
“This was when we were still at school and I remember being in awe of the perfection of it—the commercial perfection of it; it could not fail,” the singer told Mark Goodier in 2010. “But it wasn’t cheesy,” he added, “Maybe it was a bit cheesy, but it was still a cool record. I just knew that they’d made this perfect commercial record, and I knew which influences responded with what I could do.”
Although Michael grew up on some of the more melancholic indie sounds like Joy Division, he couldn’t help but become endeared to the track because—why wouldn’t he? Michael knew the power of pop formulas more than anyone throughout his career. While he enjoyed a more honest and authentic existence in his latter years, he always sprinkled formulaic magic in everything he did.
