The genre George Michael felt provided “the best records of all time”
George Michael was never apologetic about his pop star credentials by any means.
The entire premise of WHAM was intended to be about having fun, and even though they didn’t necessarily fit in with the other massive rock and roll stars out at the time, no one was able to look away from the massive voice that Michael had on every one of their songs. But even if he had affection for bands as far-reaching as Joy Division and The Beatles, he felt that a handful of tunes deserved to be up there with the greatest music that had ever reached the charts.
When looking at his reputation, though, Michael was usually all over the map stylistically. There are definitely some tunes that were purely pop in his catalogue on Make It Big, but no one would have thought that he would have had the same sense of swagger to pull off the James Dean look in the video for ‘Faith’. Even in his later years, he was more interested in what bands like Daft Punk were doing, but the sounds of soul music was where he always felt comfortable on every one of his records.
Even when he was making ‘Careless Whisper’, the pressure that he had from standing in the same vocal booth that people like Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin had been in had to be playing tricks on his mind a few times over. He idolised these people, and when it came to his own musical education, nothing got better than listening to the best bands that Motown had to offer in the 1960s.
The Beatles may have tried their best to make their own version of soul music with a Merseybeat twist, but nothing was replacing the sound of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles in Michael’s mind. These were song craftsmen who were trying to make that next glorious single every time they wrote a new tune, and when he tried his hand at singing tunes by Stevie Wonder later on in his career, he was more than capable of settling into the same morose groove as ‘They Won’t Go When I Go’.
Even if he was in awe of people like Freddie Mercury and Elton John when he was a kid, Michael had no problem calling Motown the home of the best pop songs in the world when he got the chance to work with Wonder onstage, saying, “When we actually did it he worked this whole speech around it and it became the finale to the show. It was amazing. I was there in a daze, I just couldn’t understand why they had invited me. That was great for me because it was a kind of black acceptance for Wham!. I mean the records on that label are some of the best records of all time.”
And it’s not like Michael couldn’t hold his own in many respects, either. The fact that he could manage to not embarrass himself singing next to someone like Aretha Franklin was a feat unto itself, and while most vocalists are normally left looking like karaoke singers compared to Wonder’s voice, there was no way that Michael was going to be counted out when singing ‘Love’s In Need of Love Today’.
He definitely didn’t seem like the kind of artist who could pull off that kind of voice, but Michael carried that same vocal discipline even when working next to his greatest rock and roll idols. Freddie Mercury would have been the first person to say that he wanted to sing like Aretha Franklin, and when you listen to Michael do justice to ‘Somebody to Love’, he had the same kind of vocal riffs onstage with Queen that you would have expected out of a traditional soulful diva.
It took a lot of time and patience for someone to discover that kind of voice, but Michael seemed to come by those tunes like they were second nature. He felt most at home singing those kinds of soulful tunes, and even when rock and roll seemed to go through its fair share of shakeups, he was always there making every pop song sound as smooth as possible.
