Tuesday, March 08, 2005

How can we miss George Michael if he won’t go away?

Michael film signals ‘retirement’

Singer George Michael has said that a new film about his life is the start of a retirement from public view. The pop star said it would be a much more “behind the scenes affair”, and called his own genre of music “dead.”

“I thought I should explain myself before I disappear,” said Michael, who was at the Berlin film festival to launch the documentary.

The film, A Different Story, chronicles Michael’s life and career from the 1980s and his personal struggles.

The 41-year-old told reporters that he wanted to “move his career into a different form,” but added that he does not know what it is going to be yet.

“I’m still going to be making music,” he said, but added that he was “not going to be around”.

He hinted at discontent with the current state of music industry, and said: “I don’t really think that there is anyone in the modern pop business who I feel I want to spar with.”

Michael said that the film would put his two decades of fame into context.

“It’s almost as much for me as for my fans, in terms of trying to make sense of the last 22 years and bring it to a close in a proper way,” he said.

The documentary chronicles the highs and lows of his life in the public gaze, from his meteoric rise as one half of pop duo Wham! to his arrest for lewd conduct in a Los Angeles toilet in 1998.

George Michael’s “retirement”? What does that mean? He hasn't released a record in years. Sure, there was his idiotic "Wag The Dog." That was supposed to be George's protest over the US's Iraqi invasion. It made people who had bitterly opposed the invasion re-examine their thinking, at least partly because of its embarrassing production values, which made "South Park" look like some Pixar-type CGI hyperrealism. Its understanding of international relations and its points about the U.S. invasion were on about the same level.

So is he retiring from being a has-been? In which case, wouldn’t that be a comeback? And if it is, why didn’t he precede his appearance on stage at the Berlin press conference with a recording of LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out,” which begins with the admonishment, “Don’t call it a comeback”?

George Michael’s appeal has not been merely elusive, it’s been utterly baffling. What is there to like? There is plenty that objectionable, yes. Annoying? Oh, by all means. But what was his appeal? When Michael and hapless vestigial appendage Andrew Ridgley first appeared, as Wham, they seemed like one more variation on the template of (choose one) The New Kids On The Block, The Osmonds, The Bay City Rollers, New Edition, or, if you prefer, a precursor to (choose one) Bros, N Sync, The Backstreet Boys, or any one of an infinite number of pretty much identical prefab pop-tart ephemerae. But George Michael didn’t have much appreciable talent even by the low standards of that sorry arena.

Wham disappears, and a few years later here comes George Michael looking like some unholy collision between a Miami-Vice-three-day-wino-scuzz grooming regimen, acid-washed mall-rat and tidied-up leather queen: the daughter Rainer Werner Fassbinder never had. His record company flogs the hell out of him, and George decides he’s an artist. The only thing worse than a pop-tart past its best-before date is a pop-tart with pretensions to be something other than a concoction of high-grade sucrose and empty calories. George extended his career for a few more years by recording pallid facsimiles of hi-gloss R&B Muzak that made Kenny G and Michael Bolton seem like the keepers of the Funkadelic flame. And it raises some questions about his contention that “his style of music is ‘dead.’” What style would that be? Crummy ersatz soul? Pallid rhythm and blues that has neither rhythm nor any discernable trace elements of the blues? Mawkish, sentimental tuneless ballads that even connoisseurs of the most extreme camp would find overdone and labored? While it’s impossible to know what George Michael thinks his style of music might be, and why he thinks it’s dead, it’s nice to know it’s gone; there are many things I’d be happy never to hear again, and George Michael’s “style of music” is definitely one of them.

Throughout his entire inexplicable career, one of the few consistent things about George Michael has been his constantly announcing his imminent retirement. The only other diva who’s been quitting this long is Cher, whose farewell tour is entering its third or fourth year. Michael’s arrest in that Los Angeles men’s room is his career high-point. He should have gone out on, uh, top, as it were . . . or maybe I mean “quit while he was ahead.” But how could he quit with that kind of publicity just sitting there, going to waste?

Now, however, George has come out of total obscurity to announce his retirement, like some kind of twenty-first-century Norma Desmond. Say your career is over, George? Um, well, we all pretty much figured that out around the turn of the century. But thanks for acknowledging it publicly . . . and now that we’ve got that straightened out, goodbye.

But you know he doesn’t mean it. You know it’s not really a retirement at all. In a decade or so (depending on cash depletion, possible criminal sentences, plea bargains, and other factors) George Michael and Michael Jackson will have a spectacularly creepy act ready for cruise ships, Las Vegas and certain select European venues.