The 1984 song Elton John and Sting agreed was on another level: “I wish I had written”
Elton John and Sting both had learned songwriting as if it were a craft first and foremost.
They didn’t want to make the most pompous rock and roll of all time or anything, but when they sat down at the piano or picked up a bass, both of them had a good idea of where they wanted the music to go instead of just finding the chords and seeing how everything worked out. That took a lot of training to be able to pull off, but sometimes the greatest pop songwriters are the ones who have the music baked into everything that they do.
That’s not to say that John and Sting weren’t already at an advantage, though. Both of them had studied some of the greatest composers of the pre-rock and roll era, and even if they had a good idea of what harmony was and how to construct one of their songs, that doesn’t always equate to having the best knack for pop songs. It all comes down to having the right hook at the end of the day, and being a hook writer is a completely different animal half the time you look at the pop charts.
A hook doesn’t necessarily have to sound nice for it to get stuck in people’s heads, so the best that most songwriters can hope for is finding something that lives in someone’s brain and refuses to leave. That kind of art can be downright grating for someone who lives to find annoying sounds, but when looking at the pop charts in the 1980s, there was a lot more substance to what most songwriters were doing.
Madonna was using her image to her advantage with some of the greatest pop hits of all time, and even if Michael Jackson didn’t have the videos for some of his greatest songs, he would have had some of the best tunes already at his disposal to get the job done on the radio. Both Sting and John managed the 1980s just as well, but George Michael was the kind of talent that knocked everyone back from the moment that WHAM made it big.
Anyone else would have thought of Michael as a teenybopper when they first listened to ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’, but ‘Careless Whisper’ was the first time that John heard the true craftsman that Michael was already turning into, saying in 1986, “He’s only 21 – he’s been writing songs for two years, and he writes ‘Careless Whisper’?? He is already a great songwriter… but he’s only just starting.”
Sting may have been more focused on making sophisticated music by this point, but he also knew that nothing could have come close to a chorus that bulletproof, saying, “George was a friend of mine, we were not close, but I really admired him from the pop stardom of Wham to then becoming a very, very well respected and serious songwriter and artist. I often wonder where George would be right now. It’s a big regret that George didn’t progress with his music. I love that line, ‘guilty feet have got no rhythm’. It’s the kind of thing I wish I had written myself.”
But even if Michael could continue making some of the finest pop music ever made on records like Older, that’s not where his head was all the time. He would make the occasional album now and again, but he didn’t need to deal with the music industry BS happening all the time, which probably explains why he ended up turning in his final album a whole decade before his death in 2016.
Still, that shouldn’t discount the kind of music that he was making every single time he worked on one of his proper pop songs. He was gifted with one of the greatest musical minds of his generation, and even if he didn’t use it nearly as much as he could have, we should all be thankful that he was at least able to share some of his masterpieces with us while he was still here.
