Faith
George Michael
1987
Here's what happens when I listen to an album like Faith. But first, let me clarify what I mean by "an album like Faith." I'm talking about albums that were extremely popular during the time of their release, and remain of high quality today, as I listen to it. An album that a lot of people liked a lot and I find that I like a lot too. So if that's what I mean, and I find that George Michael's Faith is absolutely one of those types of albums that was extremely fucking well-known and also really fucking good, then here's what happens for me: I start to get a little suspicious.
If it was that popular and it's that fucking good, then why haven't I heard it until now? There are plenty of reasons, the first of which is always "I'm a fucking moron." Perhaps I've made certain broad assumptions about the lack of quality in popular pop music in the 1980s, and it's taken me a lifetime and also five whole years of Blind Spots to undo those assumptions. I add to this evidence the idea that these things are cyclical, that when I was first coming into music, artists like George Michael were considered corny, and then, a couple decades later, it starts coming back into vogue. Fine, whatever.
The conspiratorial part of my brain jumps to the conclusion that Faith must have been gatekept from me because George Michael is a gay icon. A dark potent cocktail of "my role models were homophobic" and "I was never taught to disentangle identity from art" and "I'm straight so maybe this isn't for me." All pretty stupid, in retrospect, even beyond the fact that Faith does not explicitly speak to LGBTQ+ themes or values even once. But isn't it strange that pop culture news media has informed me, a young impressionable teenager in the 2000s, that the one thing you should know about George Michael is that he was arrested in 1996 for a "lewd act" in a public bathroom, i.e. he was arrested for GAY SEX?
That's half to do with this country's sad addiction to tabloid culture, but the other half, my conspiracy-addled brain says, has to do with a straight-cis pop culture telling me that it's "weird" to listen to the immaculate pop music of an "immoral homosexual." Maybe there's truth in that, I don't know. I'm certainly not at risk here in 2025 at the age of 36 to be bamboozled by the hate and prejudice. I read the story now on Wikipedia, and find great pleasure in the fact that George Michael lampooned the incident in a music video so efficiently that the pussy-ass bitch cop who set him up in the sting operation sniveled his way into a court hearing over his so-called "emotional distress" and was told by the courts that he was a pussy-ass bitch and to shut the fuck up you dumb fucking bitch cop.
And none of that even mentions the other prejudicial component of the conspiracy to keep George Michael's Faith away from me, and that is the fact that Michael was the first white artist to top the then-called Top Black Albums chart. That Billboard chart is now called "Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums," and it's sadly not surprising to me that Billboard as an institution feels the need to separate musical commercial performance based on race, nor that it took them till 1990 to at the very least not make the racial disparity so explicit. Maybe the fact that George Michael, an extremely white man, could top the so called Black Albums chart made the whole thing seem really stupid. Or maybe, like these things often go, it just forced Billboard to push the racism underground, using coded language like "urban" to basically mean Black anyway. Anyways, this isn't a screed against Billboard, this is me just basically making the same point I made about sexuality but with race this time—could be that my gatekeepers considered George Michael "too Black" to take seriously. If that was the case, then consider this me doing my due diligence and correcting the wrongs of my ancestors.
OR, maybe I'm just being a little too WOKE for this space, and it's simpler than that. The best part about Faith is that it stacks hooks on hooks, that it is an unimpeachably great pop album, that it sounds just so fucking good and catchy. And I think maybe those types of albums take a while to be appreciated as much as they should. It wasn't revolutionary to release a great pop album using that decade's already established sounds. But after twenty, thirty, forty years, you start to see the differences between this music and the rest of the music of that era that was similar on the surface but couldn't quite stack up.
Maybe something like "Faith" feels derivative of 1950s rock 'n' roll, but decades later, you realize how ballsy it must have been to tear down everything contemporary that was build by Wham! with a fucking Bo Diddley beat. Maybe something like "Father Figure" sounds intriguing but of its time, until you jump forward a generation or two and look back and realize that everyone else was going maximalism in the late-'80s, and George Michael built a #1 hit song on the most minimal of sounds. Maybe "Hand to Mouth" feels a little on-the-nose during the economically comfortable '90s, but then all of a sudden reveals itself to have a message that feels absolutely essential in the 2020s and throughout the slow collapse of our country.
You see what I'm trying to say here. Either the powers-that-be were intentionally keeping this album from me due to prejudice and hate, or it honestly just needed a little more time to flower and become the album I needed to hear right now. I'm not the only one, either—note how this album stood at #480 on the 2003 version of Rolling Stone's Greatest Albums of All Time, and jumped up to #151 for its 2020 version.
Ultimately, the when or why doesn't really matter as much as the here and now, and right now, I'm listening to George Michael's Faith on repeat.
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