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Well, we’ve come to the last 24 hours or so of voting in the 2023 Rock And Roll Hall of Fame “fan vote,” and I thought I’d start expanding my territory, so to speak, into talking more often about things other than politics, by taking a look at this year’s Rock Hall vote – in part because it’s a pretty fascinating class and the decision-making was definitely not easy.
Oh, George Michael, how the years have forced a re-evaluation of you. Back in the day when I was coming up, George was mostly the butt of jokes by anti-establishment comedians like Bill Hicks (who once proposed Michael’s first group Wham! as a possible future contender in the “Let’s Hunt And Kill…” TV game show, right after Billy Ray Cyrus and Rick Astley).
Over time, however, the combination of Michael’s pop appeal and a more matured and developed musical sense elevated him to among the best soul singers of the 90s. Breaking out as a solo act first with the upbeat radio-friendly “Faith,” Michael displayed a great range and depth in deeper cuts (which later rose to prominence), particularly ballads like “Father Figure” and the deeply bluesy “One More Try.”
Michael’s later-career struggles with drugs and fame, including dealing with his bisexuality in public after years of scurrilous speculation, unfortunately tended to overshadow his music in the press, but he quickly evolved into an “old hand” on arena pop stages, collaborating with the usual galaxy of stars (his 1993 collaboration with original artist Elton John on a cover of “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” was well-received and very deservedly so) and occasionally stumbling over tabloid scandal until his unfortunate succumbing to what I call “lifestyle poisoning,” in this case an enlarged heart and fatty liver from years of drug and alcohol abuse, at age 53 in 2016.
Because of his association with pop music and the usual workings of that subsection of the business, folks tended to assume Michael was recording songs written by other songwriters but in fact he wrote most of his own material both in Wham! and as a solo artist, and was also a skilled instrumentalist who handled all of the keyboard, bass, and drums on his debut album himself.
Aside from the artistic merits of his talent, Michael was a vocal advocate for LGBTQ rights and identity at a time when that was a hugely unpopular and even dangerous thing, choosing to stand and be who he was rather than concede to the pressures of bigotry and hate that dominated the mainstream…again, very much rock and roll by way of attitude, proof the man wasn’t just a performer playing a role.
With all that said, his career just wasn’t quite deep enough or with enough lasting influential impact on the art form as a whole for me to feel like he’s rising to the top two-thirds of this year’s class, so unfortunately I had to pass.