Trivia / George Michael

• Breakup Breakout: When Michael left Wham!, he got even more successful. Andrew Ridgeley on the other hand released one album, to minimal success, and then retired.
• Creator Backlash:
  • George was not a fan of his early work in Wham!, especially "Bad Boys". For a time, he was also confused and annoyed by "Careless Whisper"'s popularity because it was a song about cheating that he wrote at 17, and felt he had written better songs than that. (He would later mellow out on the song when he performed it for his 25th anniversary tour.)
  • His sudden low-publicity turn, which included practically zero shots of him in any videos during the first half of the 90s, was a definite reaction to his burnout from the exposure he endured during the promotion and touring behind the Faith album. The video for "Freedom '90" was practically a statement to that effect: supermodels (Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Tatjana Patitz) featured in the video in place of George, singing the lyrics, and during the song's chorus, the three following props from the "Faith" video are shown exploding in flames: the jacket, the jukebox, and the guitar.
• Creator Breakdown:
  • His album Older was a largely a collection of mournful ballads, Brazilian-inspired music, and a few dance tracks which were lyrically about getting over grief. This was because his then-boyfriend Anselmo Feleppa, who was from Brazil, died of AIDS in 1993, and Michael was so depressed about it that he couldn't focus on anything else. At the time, he had yet to come out to the general public and this made it harder for him. The album became a surprise success and gave him more hit singles than any other album he released.
  • A second one caused his lengthy hiatus between Older and Patience, as his mother died a year after the release of Older. Michael stated that at the time, he felt "cursed".
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Michael regarded "Everything She Wants", "Careless Whisper", "Last Christmas" and "I'm Your Man" as some of his best songs.
• Development Hell: Patience was planned for release over two years before it actually came out. The singles "Freeek!" and "Shoot the Dog" were released as singles in March and July 2002 respectively, but the album only came out in March 2004. "Freeek!" was even slightly remixed as "Freeek! 04" to hide how old it was. The reason why it was delayed for two years is because Michael decided to record more songs for the album.
• Hostility on the Set: He clashed with Thierry Mugler on the set of "Too Funky" over its production, apparently having gone over budget. They did eventually patch things up around 2009, when George reached out to Mugler if he could make an appearance at one of Beyoncé's concerts since Mugler was directing her tour at the time.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Despite Faith being his most popular and acclaimed work, George himself revealed in his final interview shortly before his death that he considered Older to be his greatest album. He said, "I think I wrote the best, most healing piece of music that I've ever written in my life with that album."
• No Export for You:
  • His duet with Mary J. Blige, a Cover Version of Stevie Wonder's "As" was not released in the US as a single, nor was it included in Michael's Ladies & Gentlemen or Blige's 1999 Self-Titled Album Mary there as Jay Boberg, who was the head of Blige's record label MCA at the time, vetoed the inclusion in the latter's release so much so that it forced Epic Records to not include it in the former for the American release due to his arrest at a public bathroom still fresh on their minds, according to executive producer Kirk Burrowes in 2019. Needless to say, Michael and Blige were disappointed with this decision.
    Burrowes: [Boberg] did not want to let George Michael, who initiated that original production, use it as a single in the U.S. to launch his greatest hits album. It pissed everyone off at Sony. It pissed George Michael off. It pissed everyone off, but we couldn't make Jay Boberg bend. He should have put it on the Mary album, but we couldn't put it on the album in the States because he wouldn't let George Michael put it on the Ladies & Gentlemen [album] in the States.
  • His song "Shoot The Dog", about the Iraq war, was considered so controversial in the US that it was never released over there, neither as a single, nor on the album Patience where it appeared elsewhere.
• Rarely Performed Song: Michael stopped performing "I Want Your Sex" after the Faith Tour due to his Creator Backlash towards the image he was associated with at the time.
• Referenced by...: In the Season 2 premiere of The Newsreader, Gerry Caroll is introduced singing "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)" on his talk show.
• What Could Have Been:
  • As his performance of "Somebody to Love" with Queen at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert was one of the show's highlights, he was seriously considered as a replacement for Mercury.
  • The second instalment of the Listen Without Prejudice album was going to be going to be released in June 1991 but it was shelved as Sony felt the first instalment's sales weren't strong in North America due to being unhappy with his decision to not appear in any music video for the album in order to move away from the image he was associated with Faith despite the heavy rotation of "Praying for Time" and "Freedom '90" on MTV, thus resulting in his legal battle with them. That being said, four songs from the scrapped album would be released in some form with "Too Funky", "Do You Really Want to Know" and "Happy" included on Red Hot + Dance as well as "Partyman Dance" being included as a B-side to "Too Funky". All four would later be included on the 2017 reissue Listen Without Prejudice/MTV Unplugged.

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