27 October 1984
Or if you like, Freedom ’84. This is a peculiar track. On the surface it’s even more jaunty and colourful than ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’, upsizing from a few partying go-gos to lines of almost jubilant doo-doo-doos. Yet the song within all this day-glo doo-doo is quite sour and sexist: the girl likes to play around with other boys, and George is calling her out on this. “If you love me baby, you’d deny it / But you laugh and tell me I should try it”; when guys do it in ‘Careless Whisper’ it’s no big deal, but when girls do it in ‘Freedom’ that’s just plain wrong. Noted. This trope of the cruel, heartless woman is also the basis of the two songs Wham! will release next. Along with the other common pop trope of the pushy boy trying to pressurise a girl into sex, there’s a weird but noticeable misogynistic streak in George Michael’s hit singles from late-Wham! and the Faith album. I’m not saying he’s misogynistic himself in this period—the stories of George’s genuine kindness and fairness in real life are myriad—but that’s the idiom he’s perpetuating in those songs.
‘Freedom’ feels like question one on the end-of-term paper at pop songwriting school: make an upbeat Motown hit, and be sure to include the bit where your friends say s/he is bad news. (Normally the nay-saying friends don’t show up until the second verse of a Motown song, but George puts them straight in at the start.) The goofy charm of ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ and the youthful gaucheness of earlier Wham! hits are missing here, and ‘Freedom’ is blander for it.
The one positive thing I’ll say about ‘Freedom’ is that it has George almost hitting on what suits him best: singing about his own hurt and pain. ‘Careless Whisper’ doesn’t work on that level because in the song’s narrative he’s so clearly in the wrong. Here, having Pepsi and Shirlie cooing “Hurting me, baby! Hurting me, baby!” over barrelling piano chords fairly undercuts it too. He’ll get this right in ‘A Different Corner’, ‘Jesus To A Child’, ‘Praying For Time’, aptly enough in ‘Freedom! ’90’, and most spectacularly of all in the very next Wham! single. But not quite yet.
