YMMV / George Michael

• Awesome Music: Quite many, including, "Careless Whisper", "Jesus to a Child", "A Different Corner", "Father Figure", "Faith", "Fast Love", "Freedom! '90", and "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me".
• First Installment Wins: Faith, his first solo album, was his best selling and most acclaimed work.
  • "Careless Whisper" is considered by a lot of people to be his best song, and it came out before he even had a real solo career.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Faith, while still successful in his homeland, was outsold by almost every other album he released there within the millennium. In the US, meanwhile, it had its biggest success and overshadowed everything since, earning Diamond certification (10 million shipped) and spending almost an entire year in the top 10 of Billboard's Top 200 Album chart.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • His duet with Whitney Houston, who died over 4 and a half years before he did, "If I Told You That" became this after his passing.
  • "Last Christmas" is a song about having your heart broken on Christmas Day. George Michael would pass away from a heart attack on December 25, 2016, making it eerily prophetic.
  • Also, "Jesus to a Child" was about mourning the loss of his lover Anselmo Feleppa and about knowing what it's like to lose someone you love, "like Jesus to a child". The fact that the singer died on the day of the Nativity of Jesus just makes this song a bit sadder.
  • Two of the last songs he recorded before he died were called "December Song" and "White Light" in 2009 and 2012 respectively. Yeah....
• Memetic Mutation: The saxophone riff from "Careless Whisper" being played in YouTube videos during any sexually suggestive or romantic moments.
• Misaimed Fandom: He once said that "Careless Whisper"'s popularity confused him because it's a song about cheating and yet the song is considered a great romantic song.
• Once Original, Now Common: The video of "I Want Your Sex" was controversial when released (suffice to say a love scene with a man writing on the woman's back with lipstick and blindfolding her was... uncommon at the time. Also, having "sex" in a song title was still very eyebrow-raising at the time). These days, however, it's incredibly tame when compared to more recent stuff.
• Periphery Demographic: Who would have thought the music of a gay, white British man would be so popular amongst African-American men? It helps that, at his core, George Michael had a soul voice. He could also write slow jams like "Father Figure" or seamlessly adapt to funky New Jack Swing like the Jimmy Jam-Terry Lewis remix of "Monkey". In fact, when Key & Peele wrote a character being into George Michael in their film Keanu, it was only a joke in contrast to the tough gangsters they were hanging out with. Black men liking George Michael was very much NOT a joke.
• Posthumous Popularity Potential: He spent the last decade of his life dealing with various run-ins with the police and the paparazzi, in essence becoming the butt of the joke in British tabloids. After his sudden death, his music returned to the music charts. The posthumous revelation that Michael was heavily (albeit anonymously) involved in charity work also helped his image.
• Second Verse Curse: Zig-Zagged. The most well known version of "Careless Whisper" starts with the famous instrumental sax solo. The album version actually has a soft synth violin intro before beginning with Michael's first verse. This technically makes the first verse the second verse. However, the second verse in the most well known version is the opening verses in the "Sax Intro" edit. And it gets more complicated from there.
• Signature Song: "Careless Whisper". "Faith" for his post-Wham career.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The sax riff from "Careless Whisper" sounds a lot like that of "Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty.
• Tear Jerker: Quite a few. "One More Try", "Careless Whisper", and "Last Christmas" particularly stand out, the latter even more so in light of the singer's death on Christmas Day.
• Tough Act to Follow: Faith was a top-selling album in the late 1980s, won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1988 and contains the majority of his biggest hit solo singles. He struggled to get back that level of fame since then. Not that he really cared that much, though.