The soul album George Michael called one of the best ever: ‘The best I’ve heard in many years’
When George Michael was at the top of the world, he never claimed to be the biggest rock and roll star in the world.
He definitely had influences from everyone from The Beatles to Elton John to David Bowie, but there was a lot more for him to explore in the pop realm once he came out with tunes like ‘Careless Whisper’. He wanted to follow his muse wherever it took him, but if he was trying to become one of the best singers of his generation, he was better off listening to the greatest names in soul music.
There are more than a few vocal icons in the rock and roll sphere, but when you talk about the greatest singers that ever lived, it always comes back to the world of soul and R&B. Ray Charles had practically invented the genre when he made tunes like ‘What’d I Say’, Aretha Franklin was an absolute powerhouse whenever she stepped behind the microphone, and there’s a good chance that no one else in the history of music would be able to compete with what Stevie Wonder made during his prime.
But by the time that Michael started reaching the top of the charts, the days of the Motown dynasty had started to hit a snag. There was still a lot of fantastic R&B out there if you knew where to look for it, but Prince and Michael Jackson seemed to take the model of that old-school R&B and put a little bit more shimmer behind it when they started transforming pop in their own image.
It was great while it lasted, but the genre was also bound to go through more than a few shakeups when the 1990s happened. While everyone likes to talk about how grunge helped kill off many genres of rock and roll, the rise of G-funk also managed to tear through a fair degree of R&B as well. The genre had come a long way from the days of Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson, and while there were still divas like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey dominating the sphere, there were also the alternative hip-hop crowd coming in.
The Roots had been infusing the smoothest grooves into hip-hop for a while, and D’Angelo certainly deserves his place in soul history for his work on records like Voodoo, but no one has really come up since 1998 who has been able to match what Lauryn Hill did on her debut. She was always going to be the breakout star of The Fugees, but no one expected The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill to blow up the way it did.
And for someone that had been inching closer and closer to R&B territory, Michael could only marvel at Ms Hill’s songwriting on the record, saying, “I think she’s gonna be the biggest, erm, definitely the best R&B star over the next ten years. I’m not that mad about some of the other stuff that the other two have done. But she, I mean her solo album I think, is the best soul album that I’ve heard in many years.”
Knowing what we know now, though, it’s sad to think that this was the last masterpiece that Hill ever gave the world. Ever since her stint of MTV Unplugged 2.0, there has been radio silence on whether or not Hill will ever enter the studio again because of everything else looming over her head. Which is a shame because when you see what she can still do onstage, it’s insane to think that kind of talent isn’t coming out with some of the greatest soul music ever created.
But that might have been the bargain that came with making an album as perfect as her debut. Michael had already bowed out of making albums years before his death, and while Hill has been content not to release any more new music, all we can do is be happy with the records that we still have. Sure, we would love to hear some new music, but that doesn’t make a song like ‘Doo Wop (That Thing)’ any less of a jam.
