George Michael first hit the music scene with Andrew Ridgeley as a singing duo going by the name Wham!. The punctuation in that last sentence is correct. Wham! was so big they needed an exclamation point in their name. Between 1982 and 1986 the duo sold more than twenty-five million albums.
Being part of a duo with three number one songs in a row and the biggest hit of the year in 1985 was not enough for Michael. It seems that for some reason he was not interested in the millions of teenage girls that were Wham!'s primary fan base. In 1983 Ridgeley changed the band's look from "moody in leather jackets" to smiles and fashionable clothing, with a view to promoting themselves more as hedonistic sex symbols than spokespeople for a disaffected generation. It seems that Michael was never comfortable as a sex symbol. By 1988 Michael was at the height of his popularity as a performer and as a sex symbol. The video for Faith provided some definitive images of the 1980s music industry - Michael in shades, designer stubble, a leather jacket & a particularly memorable pair of tight Levi's blue jeans & cowboy boots, playing a guitar near a classic-design jukebox. (Thanks Wikipedia)
Two Years later Michael would literally explode the image he had created. In the video for Freedom 90, Michael burned his leather jacket and blew up the jukebox and guitar which were the iconic images from his Faith Video. In interviews Michael explained that he was uncomfortable in his role as sex symbol. Michael refused to appear in the video for Freedom 90. This is a large part of what makes it the best video of all time.
The song is fine. It is a good song. Not the sort of tune you'd necessarily expect to serve as the basis for the best video of all time. But that is the genius of George Michael. At the height of his popularity as a sex symbol he found a way to make an even sexier video. He stayed out of it and got supermodels. This was in the time before anyone who was paid to pose for a picture was called a supermodel. This was when there were six supermodels, Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington. Michael got four of them in his video.
Pretty girls make videos better. This video has an overabundance of pretty. Most importantly he got Christy Turlington. Christy is so important she gets mentioned twice. Ms. Turlington is the most beautiful woman that has ever lived and this video has more of her than any other video. She looks like an angel, at least if the Pope didn't require all angels to be blondes.
Later
Bob
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