“There was an energy to our naffness,” the late George Michael observes as footage of “Bad Boys” fills the screen. The cringes and winces ensue. To watch the Netflix documentary WHAM! is to wonder why mate Andrew Ridgeley, the least naff of the pair, didn’t become the star. With his domino teeth, sun-bleached hair, and a coquettish way with espadrilles, Ridgeley projected a starched confidence: the confidence of the self-made man with nothing in his closet but more espadrilles.
The story of Wham! is the story of the friendship between himself and the man Ridgely called Yog, who matched him in ambition but surpassed him in songwriting and production talent. How Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou transformed from a hairy toadstool into a sleek leather-clad fuckbucket is one of the great swan stories in pop history. Wham!, alas, assumes the audience has no interest in the mechanics — the mess — of songwriting. To hear Ridgely and Michael tell it, “Bad Boys” and “Young Guns” and “Everything She Wants” came unbidden: miracles of compression and of the expression of joy in pop. But it does prove at last Ridgeley’s contribution to “Careless Whisper,” the deathless ballad which has allowed him to live in unencumbered prosperity in rural England for decades: a chord sequence picked out on a guitar, tentative and perhaps halting, but the essential framework. Nevertheless, between the recording of 1983’s Fantastic and 1985’s American breakthrough Make It Big!, Michael said to Ridgeley, “If we wanted to be massive, I needed to handle the songwriting.” How many men, no matter how deep their love for their best friend, would have yielded? How many would have survived this blow to the ego? Perhaps arguments took place we will never know about; WHAM! is mum about such things. But, again, affection and ambition commingled. To its credit WHAM! does not shirk from its duty to show the coldness and sense of entitlement endemic to stars. If Ridgeley wanted to live in comfort in Cornwall, he had to cede leadership to Yog.
And what tunes Michael wrote! Forty years later, how on earth could critics have mistaken “Wham Rap” as Thatcherite? “A furious REBUKE to Thatcherism; yes, we’ll take the surface of what your promise but know that nothing, but NOTHING, lies underneath,” Marcello Carlin wrote in an appraisal of Fantastic. “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” is bubblegum pop with nothing ersatz troubling its burbling surface (JITTERBUG!). As detailed as a Dear John letter, “Everything She Wants” remains their masterpiece; few songwriters of the era besides Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe were examining the discontents of consumerism, a malignant force that despoiled childbirth itself (“Now that you tell me that you’re havin’ my BABY/I’ll tell you that I’m happy if you want me to!”).
“For George, success as a songwriter was the only validation,” Ridgeley observes. Director Chris Smith’s montages of feather-haired pop stars glumly scaling the Great Wall like pissy mountain goats serves as a reminder of how the 1980s conferred on the pop star a global ambassadorship; to be seen as successful was to be successful. But Michael had the tunes. He always had the tunes. How Michael programmed the drum machines on “Everything She Wants,” invented the synth horn lines, rehearsed his vocal — Wham! touches on none of these things. It’s as if creation — the assembling of chords, melodies, and instruments over dozens of takes — sullied the idea of The Pop Star itself. If shrewd viewers watch WHAM! and conclude that Michael (and Michael Jackson, Madonna, and so on) predated our era’s totalizing of pop music as a racket whose megastars write the rules by which we will worship them, I will not bore them with Adorno quotes.
Touched with a mild bout of guilt after analyzing tissue-thin Netflix documentary for nostalgists, I re-watched the first ten minutes of WHAM! to remind myself that George Michael’s international hegemony depended on an artist’s relation to self so complete that craft was the expression of self (get the fuck outta here with your “style vs substance” bullshit, by the way); and Michael’s self during his peak years he buried in a closet. Speaking in the professional tone of a five-star hotel concierge, Ridgeley recounts how Michael summoned him to a bedroom in 1983 where backup singer/Ridgeley ex Shirlie Holliman was already hanging: he admitted to his homosexuality to Ridgeley, for whom it was by all accounts — we have no reason to doubt — no problem. The idea of Wham! as a gang of mates who took care of each other, took care of each other’s secrets, has tremendous appeal, especially given their popularity. How I wish Shirlie and colleague Helen “Pepsi” DeMacque, later of Pepsi & Shirlie, would have participated. How did they respond to a song as desolate as “A Different Corner”?
The degree to which Michael earned his biggest hits as the AIDS body count mounted is a phenomenon unmentioned in WHAM!. In its rote Behind the Music contours — George Got Everything He Wanted and Now What? — the documentary valorizes the memories of ’80s kids. Michael and Ridgeley were fun. They made millions happy. But Michael’s appetites made Wham! unsustainable; by 1986 he was bidding Ridgeley and the women farewell. We know what happened in the fall of 1987. About record label battles. The lover whose death catalyzed Michael into caring less about the career to which he had devoted himself with Trappist intensity than about being the raunchy don’t-give-a-fuck cruising gay man he could not have been in 1985. Although Ridgeley doesn’t comment on the later years, I think he might’ve repeated the sentence said earlier when Michael gently suggested the latter handle the songwriting: “We never had to discuss it again.”
Because George Michael was always Yog. Andrew Ridgeley loved him. What we watch in WHAM! is a portrait of one of the few selfless friendships I’ve seen in pop music, captured best in the sequence about the filming of “Last Christmas,” where the foursome, drunk on real wine, teased each other for the camera like the pals they were (Ridgeley, the goofball, can’t contain himself). If I return to George Michael often in my fourth decade, it’s because in the era of Drake, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Morgan Wallen, I love to watch this artist wrestle with the forces he mastered before they consumed him. To rewrite a line by the era’s other great gay pop star, he always dreamt he’d be the creature he was meant to be.
GRADE: B+
Humanizing The Vacuum 