151. George Michael, "Faith"

 


My experience with this album being limited, I turned to my wife (well, not literally, I texted her) to see what she thought about it and she replied "It's amazing!  Iconic!  How many of those songs do you know from osmosis?  And a true reinvention and setting out on his own terms in a time when there was huge label pressure not to.  It was HUGE!  That video with all the supermodels?  Gay icon!"

Sadly, the video with the supermodels turned out to be "Freedom! '90," which isn't on this album but I watched it anyway just to be safe.  But there were plenty of videos for this album too, like the title track!


I think what impresses me most about this song - indeed, about most of this album - is that George Michael wrote and arranged all the songs pretty much by himself, which would be unheard of for a major pop star today.  Take a song like "Levitating" by Dua Lipa, a perfectly catchy pop song that came out in 2020 and required three writers in addition to Dua.  George Michael could laugh.  And "Faith" is an undeniably great song, a song I knew well way before listening to this album yesterday.

My lovely wife was right about osmosis.  I knew the first four songs on this album - the aforementioned title track, "Father Figure," "I Want Your Sex," and "One More Try," all through just being in the culture and hearing them all the time.  As those titles suggest, this album is very interested in sex, and for those of you who weren't around in 1987, us Gen X'ers who were trying to have sex in that time period were constantly being told it was going to kill us if the nuclear war didn't get us first and here you had George Michael saying it's ok, go for it, "Sex is natural/sex is fun."  What a great thing to hear!

There's a lot going on in the deep cuts too.  In "Hand to Mouth," George marries a slinky beat to a bleak vision of America, populated by angry shooters, the abject poor, and the desperate:

Sweet little baby on a big white doorstep
She needs her mother but her mother is dead
Just another hooker that the lucky can forget
Just another hooker
It happens everyday
She loved her little baby
But she couldn't bear to see her living hand to mouth
Hand to mouth, hand to mouth, hand to mouth
I believe in the gods of America
I believe in the land of the free
But no one told me (no one told me)
That the gods believe in nothing

The album ends on a melancholy note, with "Kissing a Fool, " which, according to Michael, was recorded a capella in a single take.  It's a forlorn tale of a lover who won't accept the singer for what he is.  It sounds like it could be a jazz classic from 30 years earlier.

Although I was never a huge George Michael fan, he's one of the deaths where I'll always remember where I was when it happened, because we found out on Christmas Eve 2016, surrounded by friends and family, and everyone was just absolutely shocked.  As it turned out, he had longstanding alcohol and drug problems, which we sort of were vaguely aware of, but damn.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I'll go with my wife's take and say yes.

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