52 Essentials: No. 1, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1 (1990)

Welcome to Maps & Legends, a project by two new parents looking forward to sharing our favorite art and culture with our new edition. Each week in this space, we'll pick a personal favorite of ours (or at least a favorite of one of us) and write about what it means to us and why we're excited to pass it down.

For the first entry in this little experiment, I'm picking Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1, George Michael's second solo album released on September 3, 1990 (available on Amazon). If our son Max has been paying attention, he would've noticed that he's been hearing this album a lot over the past week out our living room record player. It's new to him but a pretty deep cut for us.

I was going on 12 years old and just about to start sixth grade when it came out. My initial exposure to the album was mostly through my older sister (Max's aunt), who was (and is) one of the bigger George Michael fans I've known. I recall being pretty lukewarm on the album when I first heard it. But then, I was predisposed to dislike a George Michael album at the time--the title of the album notwithstanding. His radio hits and public persona seemed a little cartoon-ish to me. It was all far too earnest for a pre-teen twerp like me about to discover flannel and angst. (Remember that this was almost one year to the day before Nirvana's Nevermind would mainstream nihilism for half a decade.)

Still, even then, I can recall thinking there was something different, something special about that album. First there was the cover art and album title. It was ambitious, pretentious even, and also sadly ironic (seeing as Vol. 2 was never to be). Gone was any hint of the 80s cheese that had defined his career up to that point. From the somber opening track to the mirthful closing track, it had all the earnestness of his prior work but without a hint of the ass-shaking, fishnet shirt-wearing, Life-Choosing pretty boy crushing on his teacher and kissing fools.

I'm tempted to say that Max should really sink his teeth into his debut solo album, Faith, first to truly appreciate what a whiplash Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1 was when it dropped. As the follow-up to that hit machine, it was probably destined to disappoint in comparison, at least from a commercial point of view. Faith was an unabashed celebration of life always teetering on the frivolous (even if it's held up well with time). And while "I Want Your Sex" was far more revolutionary than I understood at the time (a gay man declaring "sex is natural, sex is fun, sex is best when it's one-on-one" in the middle of the AIDS crisis), it couldn't possibly have prepared his fan base for the soul searching (and searing) opening track, "Praying for Time." Even in an era of fashionable finger-wagging from pop stars, from Phil Collins' "Another Day in Paradise" to Don Henley's "End of the Innocence", "Praying for Time" was (and is) unflinchingly brutal in ways the others just don't touch. While the rest of the "social message" anthems fell back on cliches and well-intentioned sanctimony, George Michael found the underlying humanity even in the very greed and fear that created society's inequities in the first place:

"So you scream from behind your door
Say 'What's mine is mine and not yours!
I may have too much but I'll take my chances
Because God's stopped keeping score.'"

From that masterwork of a song, George Michael gives his own smash hit "Faith" a run for its money in "Freedom! '90." It's just as vibrant and radio-friendly as its predecessor, but while "Faith" is really little more than a shallow tribute to rebounding after a breakup, "Freedom! '90" is a comprehensive manifesto on life, love and being true to oneself. If Max has done his homework, maybe he'll catch the cheeky reference to George Michael's earlier hit right at the front of this song, like a signal that the shallow end is fun, but you should hold your breath 'cause we're about to dive deep:

"I won't let you down;
I will not give you up.
Gotta have some faith in the sound;
It's the one good thing that I've got."

Then, just when you think it might be time to relax and have some fun, confident that you paid your dues getting through the sermonizing of "Praying For Time", George Michael really pulls the rug out from underneath you with the Stevie Wonder-cover "They Won't Go When I Go." This one in particular might be a challenge for Max to appreciate until he's older, given its funeral dirge-tempo and somber themes. (Still, I like pushing his tolerances whenever I get the chance.)

If the opening track fit alongside other downbeat pop songs of the time, the third track jumped back several decades, possibly even centuries, to a sound that wouldn't be out of place sung from the mouths of slaves in an antebellum period piece. With all that's on the album's mind, it's hard not to think of the next track--"Something to Say"--as George Michael's internal monologue before he began to work on the album, as if his own conscience was daring him to drop the cornball antics and get real: 

"If you've got something to say
Why don't you say it ...
Why can't you reach inside
Like I have"

By the time the album gets to "Cowboys and Angels", it's clear that George Michael isn't messing around anymore. Just in case you might have thought "Kissing A Fool", the closing track of Faith, was a one-off novelty track, a pop artist goofing on jazz for a lark, "Cowboys and Angels" will set you straight.

I could honestly go on for another 1000 words, but I think you get the idea. Sadly, the depth and breadth of this masterpiece was probably its undoing. A lot of it definitely went over my head when I was 12, and perhaps it was all too much for the general American audience at the time as well. While it was a hit in the UK, it sold a paltry 2 million copies in the U.S. ("paltry", that is, in comparison with the 25 million copies of Faith that were sold in 1988, making it the best selling album of that year). The album never even made it to #1 on Billboard, getting blocked by that other timeless masterpiece, MC Hammer's Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em.  For reasons never made public (but we can sadly guess), the promised Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 2 was cancelled and only a handful of tracks that would've made up the more dance-heavy sequel, such as the barn burning "Too Funky", would see the light of day.

I've returned to this album a lot over the years, but I hadn't really given it a fresh, attentive listen until George Michael's recent passing on Christmas Day, 2016 of heart failure. It's worth asking whether my current appreciation for the album is just the instinctual outpouring of goodwill towards the recently deceased. It's said all the time whenever someone dies--why wait until you lose someone to honor their contributions and achievements? Who are you neglecting in the meantime, waiting until it's too late to tell them what they mean to you?  And that's a valid point, but there's also something to be said for the gift that death brings us. It breaks through the noise of the everyday and reminds us of life's impermanence. In this sense, every artist's final gift to the world is their passing, marking the occasion to revisit their creations with fresh eyes.

Whatever you make of that, I'm finding the album now to be more prescient, more vital, more perfect than ever. Honestly, what could possibly be more fitting an anthem for the coming Trump administration than this?

"It's hard to love there's so much to hate
Hanging on to hope when there is no hope to speak of
And the wounded skies above say it's much too late
So maybe we should all be praying for time."

So for our little guy, if he's anything like me, I suspect he may need a few rounds with this album to really sink into it. And it may be a good while before he does. A lot of the themes resonated a lot harder with me only once I had some years under my belt, but I'm hoping a few infectious riffs will earworm their way into his subconscious and lead him back to the album when he's older the way it did for me.

George Michael's musical career from Wham! to Listen Without Prejudice tracks pretty well with childhood development into adulthood. Our kid is probably the right age at eight months to fully appreciate "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go", and I could see Faith providing some nice retro throwback fun for him once he's in junior high. Once he's in the teenager years, I'll hope he can still appreciate a good pop song without snarking, but I won't hold my breath. Instead, I'll just be waiting for the day (to pull one more line from today's pick) when he can rediscover earnestness--maybe in college, maybe sooner if we're lucky--and appreciate the value in having something to say--something that's honest and insightful--and saying it without fear or self-consciousness. And when he thinks he may have heard it all, maybe he'll have an occasion to sometimes stop and give it another listen, without prejudice.