It is no accident that pop singer George Michael—who died, at 53, this weekend—made perhaps his most lasting artistic imprint with a 1990 song called “Freedom” (“Freedom! ’90,” officially, to differentiate it from an earlier song of the same title put out by Michael’s starter act, Wham!). Freedom is what Michael fought for his entire life. The son of a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner and an English dancer, Michael (born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in north London in 1963) climbed his way to the top of the charts before he even turned 20, first busking in the London subway, before eventually meeting a like-minded school friend, the equally beautiful Andrew Ridgeley, and forming Wham! in 1981, a bubblegum pop duo quickly signed up. They were an immediate success on the charts with their kitschy songs about puppy love, one timeless Christmas track, and music videos filled with ‘80s neon, dreamy eyes, and big hair.
It was everything that came next, though, that would make Michael the man we admire today. He could’ve ended up the chuckled-about “remember when” in retro VH1 specials, but after five years as a teen idol (and disputes with his record label over the way Wham! was marketed), he decided he wanted more than easy fame and sugary hits. In 1987, he struck out on his own, releasing his first solo album, Faith, an enduringly sophisticated and sensual record led by the naughty first single “I Want Your Sex,” which both shed his bubblegum image and promoted responsible (monogamous) sex during the height of the AIDS era, when it was needed most. This is when I came to really know Michael, with his Cheshire smile, five o’clock shadow, and dangling crucifix earring. He seemed at that time to signal something exciting—what that signal was, I didn’t yet know, but I knew it was better than whatever I had on the floor of the living room, where I watched his videos. The album’s next singles, the self-titled “Faith,” with its irrepressible guitar line, and “Father Figure,” with its oddly Freudian overtone, cemented Michael as a grown-up pop star with something to say (a lot about sex, it turned out) and the sass to say it. Any pop star who makes the leap from tween dream—from Miley Cyrus to Britney Spears to Justin Bieber—pulls from the Michael playbook when it comes to undressing their way to being better understood, and if there is any “bad girl” or “bad boy” of pop that you’ve deeply loved in the past 30 years, you have, in part, Michael’s pioneering tight blue jeans, open motorcycle jacket, and shiny black aviators to thank.
But even that—worldwide acclaim and the affection of every girl (and plenty of boys) with a TV set—was not enough for Michael, and he chose then to make his message to the world both more clear and more profound with his next album. I’d argue that it’s the less successful and probably more influential album, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, and particularly its beloved and endlessly karoake-d single “Freedom! ’90,” that makes Michael’s artistic legacy. The late 1980s and early 1990s are something of a golden era for ambitious, artistic pop music; in 1989, Madonna released her Catholic-themed (and controversial) masterpiece, “Like a Prayer,” and Janet Jackson put out Rhythm Nation 1814, a feminist black power opus that is, among its other incredible achievements, a direct precedent to Beyoncé’s Lemonade. Janet’s brother, Michael Jackson, too would put out his own monument, Dangerous, in 1991, an introspective, risky album about adulthood and race and real love.
What people think of first when they think of “Freedom! ’90” is the stylish music video, directed by David Fincher (who also helmed Madonna’s “Express Yourself”) featuring supermodels Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, and Christy Turlington lounging around a chicly leaky and steamy loft. And boy, is it memorable: the original supers at their absolute most super, miming along with every word of the perfect song and launching a million mimicked performances in bedrooms across the planet. The supermodels’ appearance in the clip became so foundational that Gianni Versace re-created it on a runway for his Fall 1991 collection, when he had the four girls conclude the show, arm in arm, to the beat of the song.
But those girls were there for a reason—namely, so that George Michael wouldn’t have to be. In fact, the clip makes a show of having his famous old leather jacket shoved in the back of a closet and then lit on fire. “At some point in your career, the situation between yourself and the camera reverses. For a certain number of years, you court it and you need it, but ultimately, it needs you more, and it’s a bit like a relationship. The minute that happens, it turns you off.” he’d say later. By not appearing in the video for his marquee single, it was the ultimate “fuck you” to the fame industry, and specifically to the climate that MTV created (and he helped nurture) of image being as important as artistry. It was also his way of saying that no one owned him, not even the public, and he’d made a decision to do what he pleased. “Although for a long time I felt perfectly comfortable making videos, for me they have also been a large distraction from doing the one thing that makes me happy, which is writing songs and making records,” he’d tell the Times in 1990.
So, he got himself some happy, making music that was beloved without him having to shake his handsome bum on the screen. As the song’s title and lyrics suggest, Michael had found something more—something realer than the superficiality that had originally made him an idol. “There’s something deep inside of me” / “There’s someone else I’ve got to be” / “Take back your picture in a frame” / “Take back your singing in the rain,” he sings in a crescendo. “I just hope you understand” / “Sometimes the clothes do not make the man.” “Freedom! ’90” is one of the greatest odes to self-actualization ever committed to record, and almost anyone inclined to look to pop music to find inner strength has, at least once, heard these lyrics, clenched their fists, closed their eyes, and belted along to the sky.
And freedom, on his own terms, was also what Michael seemed to find. He kept more and more to himself over the years, except for the odd reminder of his unbelievable talent (his cover of “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” at a Freddie Mercury tribute is breathtaking) and a few tawdry moments in the tabloids that, in one instance, he even turned into a moment of true empowerment, if not for him, than for the millions of others who would find strength in his example. In 1998 (he was still only 34!), after his arrest in a Beverly Hills restroom for a ‘lewd act,’ he turned a humiliating moment into an opportunity to confidently proclaim himself to be gay, long before there were many other examples for him to follow on how to do so. It was a surprising third act for a man who had so insisted on his privacy that he did not appear in his own music video only eight years prior, but it is, in some senses, his most impactful legacy, at least for guys like me. That boy in the leather jacket, who turned on just about every girl and boy who saw his face, now became an icon of a very specific kind of liberation, in life now as much as in song. The incident immediately cemented “Freedom! ’90” as a powerful coming-out anthem, and to this day, every time I hear it, I hear something better even than music: the absolute bliss of feeling free, if even only for the song’s quick six and a half minutes. That’s what Michael, even in death, came to represent, for me: freedom, and the call to chart your own course, and to be your own person, no matter what.
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