Friday, September 15, 2006

Number 821 - George Michael


Number 821

George Michael

"Jesus To A Child"

(1996)
.
.
Genre:Pop
Quicker than you can run out of a public toilet block, the odds of me getting grief about this choice are gonna be fast!
But wait! There's more. In the 80's everyone loved him. When in the 90's everyone knew he was gay, people said "Oh whatever" and you all still loved him.
In the mid 90's when you all found out he liked damp toilet blocks overlooking sunny daycare centres, ya sorta got turned off.
Understandably so, but this is about music right?
Right.... so anyway, the music............

Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou (George Michael) achieved fame in the duo Wham! in his native U.K. in 1982. Through 1986, he and his partner, Andrew Ridgeley, scored hit after hit in a variety of styles from rap to up-tempo pop to slow ballads. As songwriter and lead singer, Michael gradually overshadowed the group, and by the time they split, he was ready for a massively successful solo career. This began with the 1987 album Faith, which featured a series of chart-topping hit singles and sold more than seven million copies. That Michael had not achieved a similar critical success was evident from the title of his follow-up album, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1, which must be considered a major commercial disappointment even though it sold a million copies, included two Top Ten hits, and hit number two. With Vol. 2 apparently shelved, Michael contributed several songs to the charity album Red Hot + Dance in 1992, and one of them, "Too Funky," reached the Top 20.

After the failure of Listen Without Prejudice, Michael engaged in a bitter legal battle with his record company, accusing them of not properly promoting the album and asking them to release him from his contract; he stated that he would refuse to release any records if he lost the lawsuit. He lost. After losing an appeal, Michael bought his way out of his Columbia contract and signed with the music division of Dreamworks, a fledgling entertainment corporation founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen. In 1996, he released Older, its sales clearly hampered by his long hiatus away from performing. In 1998, Michael made tabloid headlines when he was arrested for lewd conduct in a men's public restroom at a park near his Beverly Hills home; following the incident, the singer appeared on CNN and publicly revealed his homosexuality. The covers collection Songs From the Last Century followed in late 1999. ~ [William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide]
For Wham see Number 581
Rolling Stone Top 500 Songs ranked this song at Number (We don't condone that sort of behaviour!) and the Album ranked at Number (But we love Andy Warhol) Yeah Right
This song has a crowbarred rating of 62.8 out of 108

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