When George Michael released a mostly acoustic, bossa nova-inflected album in 1990, in the season of Nelson and Wilson Phillips, many critics responded as if Jordan Knight of New Kids on the Block had announced a run for president. “If Listen Without Prejudice starts a trend among Michael’s pop generation to move beyond image to integrity,” James Hunter lauded in Rolling Stone, “it could make ‘rock and roll TV’ sound more consistently and convincingly like music.” Robert Christgau wasn’t fooled: “Whatever the sleazy details, his announced decision to hold off on the dance music till next time half-proves he doesn't know as much about stardom as he thinks, and the ruminations with which he proclaims his seriousness finish the job.”
For Michael, as ever, announcements traveled subtlest as music. At the time, his most recent hit was “Heaven Help Me,” sung and co-written by his bassist Deon Estus. It sailed into the top five in the spring of 1989, less than six months after “Kissing a Fool,” the last single from Michael’s blockbuster Faith. A featherlight stab at sophisti-pop (trumpet solos, plucked guitar), “Heaven Help Me” served as testament to Michael’s multi-format ambition and do-no-wrong commercial instincts.
That “Heaven Help Me” and “Kissing a Fool” did well no doubt reassured the hyperventilating Columbia record execs when, 18 months after the Estus single, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1 came out in September 1990, preceded by its lilting acoustic single “Praying for Time.” The latter topped the chart for a week without fuss, notwithstanding a despairing vocal drenched in echo, reminiscent of Plastic Ono Band-era John Lennon, and a lyric that heaped scorn on the rich who “declare themselves poor” while the rest of us hang on to hope “when there is no hope to speak of.” Fans, disappointed by Michael’s folly, clung to the “Vol. 1” part of the album’s title. At the time, unconfirmed rumors suggested Michael had canned an album’s worth of dance material. A legal battle between Sony and Michael then followed, worthy of Bleak House. It killed the pop singer’s American career momentum.
Thanks to a four-disc reissue complete with remixes, documentary footage, and Michael’s 1996 “Unplugged” episode, audiences can hear what Sony had wanted in the Listen Without Prejudice project: a collection of variegated hues in which the pleasures of the flesh co-exist with a deepening spiritual malaise. Where once fans had to buy used copies of 1992’s Red Hot + Dance for “Do You Really Want to Know” and “Happy,” now they can appreciate how proximity to Michael’s covers of Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight and the Pips underscores the rhythmic finesse of even the quietest material. George Michael, in other words, fucked up: at a time when Faith granted him supernatural powers, he should’ve released a double album of ballads and dance material. Overreaching? Critics might have said so. But to accumulate power, one has to use it.
In its way, Michael’s insistence on releasing the “Praying for Time” single was as brave as Fleetwood Mac’s sending “Tusk” to radio in the fall of 1979. Yet it fell off the chart as swiftly as it ascended. And now it was Columbia’s turn to realize there was no hope to speak of regarding the fate of its rather defensively-titled parent album, which, ominously, had stopped at #2 behind MC Hammer’s Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em, an album that dominated its year as Faith had in 1988. In search of another “Faith” or “I Want Your Sex,” the label issued “Freedom!,” a house-inflected dance number in which Michael, again in high dudgeon but chipper about it, declared war on MTV and the system that forced him to look devastating in a leather jacket and stubble. Not giving a damn, MTV played the hell out of the video anyway—how could they not? The concept was novel: the besieged superstar out of sight, in his place a menagerie of supermodels. Disgusted with ubiquity, tired of his face, George Michael wanted to vanish.
But Michael couldn’t vanish: his voice wouldn’t let him. Pathos came as easily to him as melody to Paul McCartney. He loves because, despite the closet, he loved himself. Using the “Funky Drummer” loop, a Procol Harum-indebted organ, and an allusion to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (Jagger-Richards get songwriting credit), the third single “Waiting for That Day” taunts a fool who thinks he’s going to survive this new decade clinging to the stupid mistakes he’s made. The fool, it’s clear, is George Michael. Speaking of McCartney, British single “Heal the Pain” matches him in suppleness but exceeds him in sympathy, earnestness; instead of playing the douche whose shoulder to cry on is actually a penis in his hand, Michael sounds jazzed about being placed in this position—whenever you want him, wherever you will be, he can heal the pain. Michael’s sudden vocal ascensions at the end of each chorus lyric are a producer’s dream of an arrangement. XTC would have killed for the programmed bongos.
In the era of CeCe Peniston and Crystal Waters crossovers, the dance material on the bonus disc would’ve fit as snugly on the charts as a pair of Gap jeans. “Do You Really Want to Know” betrays his interest in Lime. “Happy” has faint hip-hop scratches, more muted trumpet, and a return to the falsetto harmonies of “I Want Your Sex.” The ebullient “Too Funky,” a top ten in the summer of 1992, boasts breathy come-ons over a Latin keyboard line and Michael, forgetting his rancor against the rich who declare themselves poor, getting the hots for a beauty of indeterminate gender drinking cheap red wine. The video was another supermodel revue, only this time Michael deigned to make an appearance—he played the director glowering, as if at gunpoint.
But the divisive stuff rests on the original album. To love Stevie Wonder’s “They Won’t Go When I Go,” a marriage of gospel and cocktail lounge melancholy with a sardonic vocal, takes patience. In Michael’s hands, it becomes the cry of a reprobate immersing himself in the waters of his influences. The seven-minute “Cowboys and Angels,” the product of a fascination with Stan Getz later explored at length on 1996’s Older, buries a lovely post-chorus within its Michael-played bass amble; it gives up none of its secrets. When Poppy Bush asked for congressional authorization to kick Iraq out of Kuwait in January 1991, he turned the pan flute-graced anti-war cri de coeur “Mother’s Pride” into a minor hit. The power of his falsetto unsheathed gives “he’s a soldier waiting for a war” a fathomless sorrow.
God’s children. Choirs. A track called “Soul Free.” On “The South Bank Show” episode included, Michael sings “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face.” He understood black music as the product of a familiarity with death leavened by the banalities of earth: love, sex, comfort. Something was happening that autumn to gay artists closeted from their fans. In October, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe released Behaviour, the quietest album of the Pet Shop Boys’ career. The unceasing piling up of bodies killed by HIV had made, for the moment, the bacchanal into a gauche if not repulsive gesture of sentimentality.
For those of us too young for the plague years—who can imagine, at least, a life lived instead of convulsing in agony on a hospital bed—chastising Michael for leaning on elegies and ballads in 1990 strikes me as glib. In its original form, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol.1 was the follow-up that Faith demanded; in this new incarnation, it’s a miscellany unruffled by notions of coherence, an attempt to make art out of George Michael’s quarrels with himself. Never again would these quarrels work to such bounteous ends.
