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The 15 Best George Michael Songs

A list of the most ambitious, genre-defying music by pop’s reluctant gay icon.

The 15 Best George Michael Songs
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When I was eight years old, my mother was forced to give me “the talk.” “I Want Your Sex,” the lead single from George Michael’s solo debut, Faith, was in heavy rotation on MTV during the summer of 1987. I approached my mom, wide-eyed, and asked, “What’s monogamy?” Michael writes the word in red lipstick on the naked back of his then-girlfriend, model Kathy Jeung. Quick on her feet, my mother offered a thoughtful, albeit predictably heteronormative, answer: “It’s when a man and a woman are married.”

Over a decade later, Michael’s “Outside” introduced my teenage brain to “cottaging” long before I even knew there was a term for it. A tongue-in-cheek response to the singer’s arrest for soliciting sex in a public restroom in 1998, the song prompted Michael to finally come out as gay. The former Wham! frontman’s sexuality, of course, had been grist for the rumor mill for years, and for those who cared to notice, his ambivalence was delicately documented in his lyrics. For an adolescent or teenage fan questioning his or her sexuality, Michael’s reluctance—or inability—to go public made him easier to identity with than, say, a bold, out-and-proud performer.

Even as he began to slowly reveal himself to his fans, though, Michael began to retreat from the public eye. His refusal to appear in his own music videos seemed audacious and cocky, predating Eddie Vedder’s rejection of the media hype surrounding grunge in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Michael’s protest resulted in some of the most visually striking and powerful music videos of the 1990s, including “Praying for Time,” “Freedom! 90,” “Too Funky,” and “Killer/Papa Was a Rolling Stone.”

A contractual dispute with Sony Music meant nearly six years would pass between Michael’s sophomore effort, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, and 1996’s Older, an album that’s been largely overlooked in the celebrations of Michael’s career in the days following the 53-year-old’s death on Christmas day. That album’s singles, three of which appear on our list of Michael’s best songs, capped off a decade of the some of the most ambitious, genre-defying pop music by one of the world’s most reluctant gay icons. Sal Cinquemani


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15. “Freeek!”

The kinky leather daddy to the comparably vanilla “I Want Your Sex,” the similarly squelchy “Freeek!,” from 2004’s Patience, explores queer cybersex and exhibitionism. If the former song feels kitschy in all its time-stamped Casio keyboard glory, “Freeek!” is thumping and robust, a strapping dance track built around samples of Aaliyah’s “Try Again” and Kool & the Gang’s “N.T.” by way of Q-Tip’s “Breathe and Stop.” Cinquemani

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14. “Monkey”

On the surface a finely constructed bit of straightforward ’80s dance-pop, given extra edge by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (fresh off their instantly iconic work on Janet Jackson’s Control). Then the frustration evident in Michael’s lyrics starts moving from exasperated to, ultimately, over it. Maybe it’s a song written from both sides of the closet door, or maybe it’s a little more universal than that—an anthem for anyone who’s ever loved someone who isn’t willing or able to meet in the middle. No monkey business here. Eric Henderson


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13. “Praying for Time”

When I was a child, I misinterpreted a lyric in “Praying for Time”—“Turned his back and all God’s children crept out the back door”—by mishearing “and” as “on,” suggesting God turned his back on his people and crept out the back door, not the other way around. It’s an insinuation befitting a modern-day “Imagine” that trades John Lennon’s optimism with world-weary despair. (It’s also a comment on how cynical I already was at just 10 years old.) My recent discovery that that’s not, in fact, what Michael sings was initially disappointing, but as 2016 comes to a close, the accusation that God’s children have abandoned all that is just—bolstered by lines like “The rich declare themselves poor”—seems more prescient than ever. Cinquemani

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12. “Fastlove”

An ode to one-night stands dressed up in the disco sound of a period when such things weren’t potentially fatal, 1996’s “Fastlove” pulses with a sullen undercurrent. The song was written in the wake of the AIDS-related death of Michael’s lover, and though the lyrics seem to reject heteronormativity (“My friends got their ladies, they all have babies/But I just wanna have some fun”), “Fastlove” reveals Michael’s pursuit of sex to be an attempt to soothe his grief: “In the absence of security, I made my way into the night/Stupid Cupid keeps on callin’ me, but I see nothin’ in his eyes/I miss my baby.” Cinquemani


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11. “Star People ’97”

The album version of “Star People” was a little too starched to fully embody Michael’s bad faith in the celebrity machine. The ’97 remix loosens up the straps and cuts a much nastier rug, like a dance-floor Maps to the Stars. Michael spitting taunts of “Maybe your mama gave you up boy/Maybe your daddy didn’t love you enough girl” would sound like victim-blaming in any other context, but by the time the song explodes into an extended outro vamp accompanied by a replayed vamp from the Gap Band’s “Burn Rubber On Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me),” it’s clear Michael himself knows all too well the sting they feel. Henderson

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10. “Outside”

Contrary to the party line, “Outside” wasn’t just cheeky damage control, at least not in the sense that pop culture usually accepts apologies. His first single following the tabloid-titillating public-bathroom sexcapade, “Outside” finds Michael pretty far from contrite. No somber strings or earnest pleas here. Michael comes on like Scarlett O’Hara walking into Melanie’s birthday party in fire-engine red. Like the best disco, the song flies in the face of fun police. Listen carefully to the timbre of Michael’s voice following the climax of the second bridge, that unmistakable mewling satisfaction. That’s not the voice of someone who’s sorry about being a nasty pig. Henderson


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9. “I Want Your Sex”

Can radio airwaves tender consent? The line sure seemed fuzzy the moment the wet percussive drips that kick off Michael’s porny fulfillment of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. “Every man’s got his patience, and here’s where mine ends,” he sneers right before launching into the most directly honest chorus in ’80s pop outside of Rick James’s Street Songs. The single edit is a spare thing of beauty but Faith allows it out of the harness, first morphing into a Stax-ian exercise a la “Sledgehammer” and then, in the album’s extended outro, releasing into a wash of quiet-storm afterglow. From top to bottom, a pretty fantastic lay. Henderson


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8. “They Won’t Go When I Go”

Almost every artist who covers Stevie Wonder winds up in the same boat as Hollywood stars in biopics. There’s always something off, but the actor is often given credit for making a valiant attempt. Michael’s version of “They Won’t Go When I Go” is the galvanizing exception, and not only because his voice is one of the few technically capable of tackling a Stevie melody. The original version was a fleeting glimpse at existential darkness delivered by a man who, having survived a near-fatal car accident, had just fought his way back from the brink. As ludicrous as it might seem to compare Michael’s reimaging campaign on Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, you can’t deny the conviction in his voice. Nor the precision. Henderson


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7. “Jesus to a Child”

Deliberately chosen as the opening song of Michael’s greatest-hits collection Ladies & Gentlemen, “Jesus to a Child” is among the most haunting of Michael’s ballads, and one whose meaning could only fully emerge after his coming out. A slow-motion flamenco cry, written following the death of his lover, Anselmo Feleppa, “Jesus to a Child” still remains supernaturally clear-eyed about what it means to love and to lose. “I’ve been loved so I know just what love is/And the lover that I kissed is always by my side/The lover I still miss was Jesus to a child.” Henderson

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6. “Do You Really Want to Know”

An orphaned track from Michael’s tragically abandoned dance-centric sequel to Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, this delectable pop-house track about safe sex was released during the height of the AIDS crisis in 1992. Michael’s struggle with his sexuality was carefully coded in his lyrics in the early ’90s, and his use of pronouns is intentionally ambiguous on “Do You Really Want to Know”: “If you knew every woman and I knew every man, we never would have made it past holding hands,” he sings, and lest you think he was ready to come out, he later reverses the words “man” and “woman.” With its laser-like synths, bouncy keyboards, and brawny brass section, however, the song’s message reached its target demographic like a dog whistle; it might be the most upbeat song about AIDS ever. Cinquemani


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5. “Cowboys and Angels”

Many of Michael’s ballads are constructed so returns to the chorus are accompanied by subtle shifts in wordplay, indicating an omniscient point of view, as well as a then-necessary obfuscation (e.g. the pronoun game). Never has he made a more convincing narrator or life coach than in “Cowboys and Angels,” as the song switches course from detailing the many ways love “always ends the same” to imploring, “Please be stronger than your past/The future may still give you a chance.” Henderson


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4. “Everything She Wants”

It’s hard to square the artist who—in 1984, as half of Wham!—espoused the virtues of monogamy (on “Freedom”) and traditional gender roles (on “Everything She Wants”) with the gay man who would go on to write songs about the virtues of “fast love” and anonymous public sex. “Everything She Wants” places the singer in the masculine role of provider to a gold-digging wife, who, of course, is pregnant. It’s an unremarkable, reactionary narrative for a pop song, but it’s the mix of silky R&B hooks and impeccable synth-pop production that makes the track—which was composed and produced by Michael—one of the artist’s best. Cinquemani


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3. “Too Funky”

Even amid the best efforts to quell AIDS hysteria and steer activists away from slut shaming, it took some breathtaking balls to present, as the lead single for the AIDS-research benefit compilation album Red Hot + Dance, a song that insists “I’ve got to see you naked, baby” and “I gotta get inside of you.” It semiotically embodies the very essence of house-fueled cruise culture. The same year that Madonna and Shep Pettibone got the fever on Erotica, Michael’s piano-pounding “Too Funky” was first in line to turn up the thermostat. Henderson

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2. “Father Figure”

Putting aside, for a moment, the eyebrow-arch-inducing juxtaposition of lyrics like “Sometimes love can be mistaken for a crime” with lines like “Greet me with the eyes of a child” and “I’ll be your daddy,” not to mention the curiosity of a singer-songwriter whose relationship with his own father was notably adversarial casting himself in the role of a proxy parent, “Father Figure” is nonetheless a sexy slice of blue-eyed soul and an expertly constructed pop ballad—ironic considering it was originally mixed as a dance song. And Michael’s reverb-drenched vocals are delivered with the kind of authority that could disarm even the most wary armchair psychologist. Cinquemani


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1. “Freedom! ’90”

The second single from Michael’s 1990 album Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 conflated personal and professional struggles not just because they were similar or happening concurrently, but because, for him, they were one and the same. When Michael sings, “There’s someone else I’ve got to be,” it’s both a rejection of the masculine pin-up image he cultivated with Faith and a wholesale plea for self-actualization. His vow of loyalty—“I won’t let you down/I will not give you up/Gotta have some faith in the sound”—wasn’t ultimately reciprocated by his fans, but “Freedom” is still Michael’s best single, pairing his own approximation of James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” with a killer bassline. Cinquemani

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