Forty years ago, the pop duo Wham! released the single “Freedom” – a sweet, agile track about a boy seeking commitment from an evasive lover. Its video, put out the following year, showed footage of the pair’s tour of China – Wham! having made history as the first Western pop act to play in the country. It was a strange moment, this collision of light pop hit and emergent communist nation, somehow finding accord in the refrain: “I don’t want your freedom.”
The video showed grainy images of crowds and car rides, bicycles flooding across public plazas and the two popstars larking about on the Great Wall. In one frame we see George Michael, golden and mulleted in a Red Army cap, his face half-obscured by the camera he holds; the film captures him in a playful dance with a paparazzo, each trying fervently to photograph the other.
Six years later, Michael would release “Freedom ‘90”, the third single from his second solo album. Despite the shared title, this was a wholly different number. Six and a half minutes long, and leaning on a sample from James Brown’s 1970 single “Funky Drummer”, the peculiarity of the song’s structure has been widely noted. In a detailed study, Ethan Hein, adjunct professor of music at New York University, observed the way its four bar instrumental intro is followed by a chorus harmony and an instrumental break, with the first chorus only arriving two minutes in. “An eternity,” Hein said, “most pop songs are practically over at that point.”
To the casual ear, it sounded both wilful and exploratory. Its unconventional shape suggested Michael – who was also the album’s producer and arranger – was now a serious artist and no longer tethered to the neat confines of a three-minute pop song. It nodded, too, to club culture, house music and the sprawl of Madchester, and in so doing implied an unseen, adult side to Michael’s life.
George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90” is clear: together, we can liberate each other
It was also a strikingly open song – one that revelled in the singer’s post-Wham independence. Michael spoke plainly of his former life: of youth and prettiness and fantasy; of the days when he was “every hungry schoolgirl’s pride and joy”; of big-shot goodtime bands and rock and roll TV. But he sang, too, of the dishonesty and mistakes of that time, of the realisation that something had to change.
It’s remarkable to think that “Freedom ‘90” was released eight years before Michael spoke publicly of his sexuality. To reconsider the song in this light is to hear it more clearly; the pain in suppressing one’s true self, the confusion in singing songs that perpetuate heteronormative relationships. “Today the way I play the game is not the same,” he sang in 1990. “Think I’m gonna get myself happy.”
What’s always been striking about “Freedom ‘90” is the way Michael directs the song to the listener, to his fans, as if circumnavigating the industry that has tried to shape or restrict him. He opens the first verse with a pledge: “I won’t let you down/ I will not give you up/ Gotta have some faith in the sound.” And closes it with a plea: “So please don’t give me up/ ’cause I would really, really love to stick around.” It’s a remarkable show of fragility – a major recording artist, imploring his fans to let him continue his music career. I struggle to think of a precedent.
From the very start of the song it helps to create a kind of equality between Michael and his audience. Later, he draws on that established equality to make a call to action: “All we have to do/ Is take these lies and make them true, somehow,” he sings. The action is collective, but the suggestion is tentative, tempered by that frail “somehow” – as if, once again, he needs his listeners’ help. “All we have to see/ Is that I don’t belong to you/ And you don’t belong to me,” he continues, and the implication is clear: together, we can liberate each other.
The video to Freedom ‘90, directed by David Fincher, was a glossy affair featuring five of the world’s top supermodels, and in which Michael himself refused to star. “At some point in your career, the situation between yourself and the camera reverses,” he explained to the Los Angeles Times. “For a certain number of years, you court it and you need it, but ultimately, it needs you more and it’s a bit like a relationship. The minute that happens, it turns you off.”
I find it impossible to read this and not think back to footage of the young Michael, standing on the Great Wall of China, camera in hand, photographing the photographer. Wondering, perhaps, how it might feel to reverse that relationship.
And I think, too, of the song that plays over that footage. A song of courtship and needing, of a young man who realises he holds his own freedom in his hands, but has yet to find the courage to seize it: “Like a prisoner who has his own key,” he sings, “But I can’t escape until you love me.” In just a few short years, how different his freedom will come to sound.
Laura Barton is a writer and broadcaster. Her book “Sad Songs” is out now
