May 03, 2009
what you get for changing your mind (chapter four excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
George Michael’s “Freedom ‘90” does not of course concern world events; its providential name was required to distinguish itself from the earlier Wham! song “Freedom.” It nonetheless manages to crystallize the feeling of the post-Wall moment without taking a stance regarding it, through its sense of unbounded duration as liberation, its formal evocation of the sudden absence of barriers — and its sense of this as something potentially intrinsic to the music, to the truth of pop.
The lyrical niceties of the song are not hard to parse. As commercial autobiography, its opening gesture summons the familiar conversion from seeming to reality: the maturation from contrived pop star to real artist. In Michael’s case, this clichéd story of integrity found must ghost for his gradual and more problematic self-revelation as a gay man, after having acceded to being marketed as “every little hungry schoolgirl's pride and joy.” The lyrics work this double-shift with charming concision, including strategically ambiguous cliché (“sometimes the clothes do not make the man” and so forth) and directness (“when you shake your ass they notice fast; some mistakes were built to last”).
The limits of this narrative are shaken by an irreconcilable vector: the song’s unabashed pleasure in the very pop it claims to have exposed and outgrown. This happens transparently if surprisingly in the lyrics: “Heaven knows we sure had some fun boy, what a kick just a buddy and me,” he sings, referring to his supposedly abject days in the germ-free duo Wham! “We had every big shot good-time band on the run boy, we were living in a fantasy.” That this delight is casually tied to a male-male bond — that is, to the confessional’s half-hidden truth — is one of the secrets the song yields; this shortly finds a place in the song’s larger irony, wherein the main thrust of the lyrics is contradicted by the structure and melody.
“Freedom ‘90” is an anomalous length for any pop song, much less one that spent 40 weeks in the Hot 100. And yet its length does not turn out to be an occasion to vanquish the superficial felicities of the three-minute song, and indeed it has little interest in outgrowing the category of “pop.” As a musical construction, the song goes about the very opposite; it’s machined to appeal as broadly as possible, from its shuffle-beat and handclaps to its gospel chorus and series of major key resolves.
The salient quality of “Freedom ‘90” thusly is its very excess of hooks. Everything about the song speaks of this surfeit, from its sheer length to the simultaneous presence of not one but several globally famous fashion models in the video to the brand new vocal melody improvised around the chord structure during the closing fade — as if to suggest infinite invention, limited only arbitrarily and for the moment. This pleasurable excess is the song’s logic. Against the masculine-coded renunciation of pleasure which historically defines the “mature” rejection of pop (which is for women and children), the song poses the truth of pleasure as the excess within pop — a rhetoric less than opaque regarding the song’s shadow narrative of queer sexuality as unrecuperable excess and freedom at once.
The song finally proposes not freedom from, but freedom through — if it is transcendent, and it certainly feels that way, it does not seek to transcend pop but simply to explode bounded pop for the unbounded, without prohibition or border.