The singer George Michael said was out of his league: “This otherworldly god”
There are some pieces of genius in every George Michael album that are almost easy to miss.
The pop superstar might not have taken himself all that seriously whenever he made a new album, but he did have that uncanny ability to make the world stop whenever he opened his mouth to sing. But even if he could manage to hold his own next to the giants of the industry like Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder, he was never going to entertain the idea of dethroning many of his idols.
Because, really, how could he? Michael was the first person to shout the praises of someone like Freddie Mercury, for instance, but no matter if he was playing shows with WHAM or working in his prime, there was no one listening to him sing ‘Somebody to Love’ and thinking that the band should go on tour and have Michael sing all of Mercury’s parts. I mean, for one, Michael’s voice wasn’t always suited to that brand of music.
He might be known as one of the kings of pop to come out of the 1980s, but beyond the traditional poppy fare he was known for, Michael was a soul singer more often than not. All of his favourite music always came from Motown, and what was coming out of America, and while he didn’t always hit the nail on the head when working on his soulful tunes, it wasn’t a mistake for him to tap artists like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis when it came time for him to reinvent himself on tunes like ‘Monkey’.
Soul music may have suited him fine, but his idols were also ones to take chances. Queen were never the same from one record to the next, and as much as he embodied every second of ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me’ when performing it with Elton John, the piano legend was always trying to search for the next brilliant melody rather than worrying about staying true to what made him a star in the first place.
And out of all Michael’s influences, no one seemed to understand the need to change better than David Bowie. From day one, ‘the Starman’ made it his mission to search for musical landscapes that most people were too scared to go to, and whether it was him leaning into soul music on Young Americans, embracing electronic elements on Station to Station or establishing himself as one of the kings of glam rock, Michael was along for the ride every single time he made a new record.
Bowie may have been the consummate artist that anyone would have wanted to match, but Michael was smart enough to realise that he would never get there, saying, “I was never gonna be Bowie. You know what I mean? Because I didn’t think I was ever gonna be… I thought I would be the equivalent of Elton without a piano, in that people would never attach sexuality to what I was gonna be doing. So it didn’t occur to me… 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.”
Even if he was off to the side, Bowie’s influence didn’t need to be said in order to be heard half the time. Michael’s habit of taking over the studio and building songs from the ground up was a lot more in line with how Bowie conducted his greatest records, and while his voice didn’t have the same tone as ‘The Thin White Duke’, he could definitely take a few more chances with his music, like when he started working on the more mature tracks that would end up on Older.
So while Michael is quick to say that he would never be like Bowie, that was practically a compliment to the man who dared millions of people to dream. No one was going to have the career he had, but his entire existence taught every musician a lesson that they needed to learn: anyone can build a career off of copying, but you don’t become legendary unless you are truly yourself.
