Wednesday, July 19, 2023

wham bam i am the man!

  



In my 9th grade year I was briefly into Wham! They took a backseat to my more serious Joan Jett and The Police fixations. I had every Police album plus a bootleg they recorded at CBGBs in 1978. 

Wham! were cute and had a few catchy songs. My favorite to this day is Everything She Wants which I had on 12". The more I got into punk the more Wham! became too mainstream. By the time Careless Whisper came out, I couldn't stand that song. It sounds like a love interlude with Michael Bolton on sax - a 1980s TV movie theme with steam and backlighting. I'm a romantic and Careless Whisper is trash. The lyrics are excruciating.

I'm never gonna dance again. 

Guilty feet have got no rhythm. 

Feet can feel guilt? Feet can have rhythm?

Somehow that was a big hit. I was selective with Wham! I never owned an album or cassette, just that 12" because Everything She Wants is dope ass pop.

I always had a sense that George was gay. In the early 1980s, a boy in jeans, a leather jacket, and espadrilles, was quite Euro gay. The butch version was a rocker or a break dancer. George just didn't signal butchy butch. This became more apparent in his 1990s video collaborations with designers, models, and house-infused pop. I think that was his creative peak. George's world didn't signal sexy straight, but sexually fluid. By 1998 he came out and more into himself. He donned a Caesar haircut and, in his best MTV unplugged set, a sharp eggplant, tailored suit.

George had become grown and sophisticated.  

He was a chic pop star, expanding his soulful voice and range. I'm a sucker for the soulful voice. He kept knocking it out of the park with dance jams and live duets. Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me with Elton, Somebody to Love with Queen in tribute to Freddy and As with Mary J.  As a performer, George was impressive live. My favorite album of his in Listen Without Prejudice. It's conceptual pop with songs about love, leaving home, self-transformation, of cowboys and angels, and a cover of Stevie's They Won't Go When I Go, which George sang beautifully. It is very difficult to cover a Stevie song and mean it.  As I and George got older, it was hard to imagine what a teenybop star he was in the early 1980s. That I was myself, long ago, a teenybopper.

I saw Wham! for the first time on American Bandstand where he and Andrew performed Young Guns, a pop cliché tune where a dude is talking to his best friend about the joys of being single bros on the run because love is for losers. 

Young guns having some fun
Crazy ladies keep 'em on the run
Wise guys realize there's danger in emotional ties
See me, single and free
No fears, no tears, what I want to be
One, two, take a look at you -
Death by matrimony

Poetry, really. 

George also raps ( badly ) and they did a ridiculous dance as though they were shooting pistols. This appealed to teenage girls like myself. Pop itself is all fantasy, not reality and we ate it up. As long as anyone is cute and dancing, everything was cool. Who cares about the inevitability of death? 

Most Wham! songs were horrible, but a few were jams. They lost me by the time Wake Me Up Before You Go Go came out. I couldn't take the Wham! hair or the Wham! clothes. I was too aesthetically dark to appreciate Wham! optimism anymore. If one was listening to Alien Sex Fiend or Nina Hagen it was unlikely they were listening to Wham! The Wake Me Up Before You Go Go video looked like an Esprit de Corps ad and I didn't like Esprit de Corps' shiny, happy vanilla image. 

Wham! was charming to watch; like going back in time. I was joking with a friend recently reminiscing about 1980s pastels. Fortunately that color palette passed me right on by. I was usually in the darkness. At the time, Ma was a fan of Georgia O'Keefe paintings, which was an entirely pastel palette. My friend referred to one O'Keefe series as the ' vagina flowers'. I laughed, remembering them as exactly that. 

I never saw the Southwest as pastel, but Georgia certainly did. I accepted Ma's feminine taste for a long time. My weirdness and dark androgyny baffled her to no end. My favorite commentary of hers, which was part parenting, part pandering to the patriarchy, ' You'd be such a knockout if you didn't dress like a bum!'

In other words, dress more like a girl. 

Our mothers, even the hippy ones, were of a different time; neat, feminine, and ladylike. Punk was the antithesis of such refinement. 

I never saw a Wham! show - it wasn't that serious. I was serious about The Police who I saw several times until the Synchronicity tour which destroyed my love forever.  It was such a corny spectacle that they even entered (vis a vis landed ) in a helicopter at the Coliseum.

You know art is dead when a rockstar arrives in a helicopter. That was a Mötley Crüe move, not a band that came out of England's punk scene. 

I was at that age; fickle and frivolous, always curious and experimenting. In love with and quickly out with different bands. I was at my whims, wide awake in a wonderland of punk, ska, and New Wave. What melancholy to remember how young and possible we all were then. I enjoyed my adolescence, even if it was often wrought with confusion. I had awesome friends; now reconciled to a middle aged future that was abstract then. Sadly, some lovely people never made it to the future. Before we dove into the deep end of adulthood and experience, for a short time we were young and sweet like Wham!


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