"People -- you can never change the way they feel. Better let them do just what they will."
Charting Singles from This LP:Faith, Father Figure, I Want Your Sex, One More Try, Monkey, Kissing a Fool
The fifties exploded pop music. The sixties perfected it. The seventies carried its torch through a coke-riddled haze. And the eighties evolved it into something immensely more massive and ferocious; the eighties gave us Super-Pop. This was the age when giants roamed the Earth -- the Madonnasaurus, the Veloci-Prince, the fearsome Jackson Rex.
This LP fits right in with those juggernauts. In the sixties, it was about taking the recent singles and compiling them into an LP. In the eighties, it was about crafting an LP that was overloaded with potential pop hand grenades.
As a result, it took George Michael two years to make "Faith." In contrast, The Monkees released five whole LPs in a single two-year period. And his diligence paid off. Of it's nine tracks, seven were released as singles. Four of them were number one hits on the pop chart. Two more broke the top five. Juggernaut.
The best proof I can offer is this... "Why do I have to share my baby with a monkey?" should not be a line from the chorus of any non-novelty pop hit. I get that that the monkey is an obvious metaphor for addiction, but that only makes it about ten times less pop-friendly. And yet...
God bless the eighties.
So, is it an album? Yes. "Written, arranged and produced by George Michael" pretty much says it all -- except that he also sang it and played a bunch of the instruments (sometimes all of them).
Up next, we go "Bustin' Loose" with the Pure Prairie League.
No comments:
Post a Comment