12.25.16

the dirty dozen {12 george michael recollections}

01 my wham! music from the edge of heaven cassette had a "hot side" and a "cool side." god, how i loved that.
02 the times didn't have an obituary on file for him.
03 he sang queen's "39" as a teenage busker on the london tube; queen later considered him to replace freddie mercury. "there's a certain note in his voice when he did 'somebody to love' that was pure freddie," brian may said.
04 my friend adriana pulled me aside as we walked to our elementary school's outdoor cafeteria. "george michael has a new song," she hissed. "it's called 'i want your S-E-X.'"
05 he chose the lip-syncing supermodels for the david-fincher-directed "freedom '90" video (in which he refused to appear) after seeing the january 1990 cover of british vogue with a group photo by peter lindbergh. "i knew george wanted everybody that was on that cover, and it had to be all the girls," cindy crawford said.
06 when my sister was a toddler, she'd walk around singing "faith": "well i guess it would be nice / if i could touch your body / i know not everybody / has got a body like you."
07 "i have the audience i deserve. or at least i have the audience that represents the kind of people that i like."
08 he called his twitter followers his "lovelies," and himself "the singing greek."
09 in 1985, wham! became the first western band to perform in china. concertgoers were given a cassette with their songs on one side and the opening act (cheng fangyuan)'s versions on the other. some of the lyrics were changed in the chinese covers:
Wake me up before you go go
Compete with the sky to go high, high
Wake me up before you go go
Men fight to be first to reach the peak
Wake me up before you go go
Women are on the same journey and will not fall behind.
10 he performed in bulgaria in 2007 in support of the five nurses jailed in libya.
11 "the time was right to strike home with sixties escapism," he told rolling stone about wham! when he was 23. "sixties presentation, sixties attitude towards the songs. that's what made us big. basically, we made everything look wonderful. wham! was a sixties pop group in the eighties."
12 he spent the '80s shooting down requests to license his songs for commercials. "there was one where 'go-go' was supposed to become 'cocoa.' imagine, 'waking up to some cocoa.'"