Every video prominently featured his body. George Michael, in contrast, oozed sexuality. His clothing, such as his extra long t-shirt in Do You Really Want to Hurt Me, for example, was usually loose and flowing, hiding is body. Aside from an occasionally flirtatious look (always directed towards men, as in I’ll Tumble 4 Ya or Miss Me Blind), Boy George comes off as safely asexual in his Culture Club videos. He was an oddly neutered rock star despite his genderbending and gay allusions, not unlike a minstrel or clown. Videos like I Want Your Sex, Father Figure, and Careless Whisper are aggressively heterosexual in their storylines and sometimes bluntly sexual, almost pornographic in their gratuitous raunchiness.Ĭan you imagine Boy George making out with a woman in a video? It’s impossible. George Michael, in contrast, marketed himself as a heterosexual heartthrob. Boy George dodged questions about his sexuality while Culture Club was popular, but he never pretended to be interested in women. He hid his gayness and went out of his way to appear heterosexual as a solo artist. His hair and clothing were traditionally masculine. George Michael, in contrast, became cartoonishly gender normative as he shifted away from Wham and towards a solo career. Boy George alluded to his gayness in his clothing and make-up, shifting over Culture Club’s career from baffling androgyny to more straightforward drag. They each played games with the public, but different kinds of games. Neither admitted that fact while they were active in their respective groups. Both were major stars of MTV in its golden age. George Michael is a fascinating contrast to Boy George in how his gayness was and wasn’t expressed in his music videos. (Both quotes from I Want My MTV!, 201, 311) But I’ll put it this way: The way he looks on film, you’d be hard pressed not to pick up on it.” He had armies of girl fans, and people used to think it was important to keep it a secret. I tried to talk them out of it, but my management partner, Simon-Napier-Bell, was more camp than a row of tents. “Wham!’s ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ is a bit camp. –Simon Napier-Bell, Wham! Manager (quoted in Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory, 119) They’re obviously straight and virile, but they’re still more interested in each other than anyone else.” It’s that extraordinary relationship like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that has been done so many times in movies but never before in pop music. Their sort of homo-erotic image has never been used in pop.
“The thing that will continue to sell Wham! is the relationship between them. Moreover, the song's individual elements are the work of a fully formed pop craftsman - from the way the keyboards and bass interact and leave room for each other to breathe, to the playful bass voice chanting "jitterbug" at regular intervals, to Michael's accentuation of the arrangement by adding (and subtracting) a lightly swinging horn section and soulful backing choir.“Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” and “Careless Whisper” The song is tightly and impeccably constructed, and its inescapable melody and bouncy beat are almost a force of nature, so difficult are they to resist.
"Wake Me up Before You Go-Go" is relentlessly perky, but to dismiss it as mere fluff is to overlook a tremendous guilty pleasure. It was also the first clear evidence of Michael's seemingly effortless mastery of the pop song form, a facility he would demonstrate time and time again over the next decade. The almost blindingly bright, soul-tinged pop confection "Wake Me up Before You Go-Go" gave the British duo Wham! their first number one single in 1985, establishing George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley as the premier bubblegum teen idol act of the mid-'80s.
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