Search - George Michael :: Twenty Five (Dlx)

HAUNTING WHISPER

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 09/22/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"It is well over twenty years since I first heard Careless Whisper. My children were playing a tape of it during a long car journey, and it caught my attention and has haunted my recollection ever since. My own musical home ground is classical, and I have never followed the charts to any great extent. However music to me is just music, its effect is unpredictable and irrational, and there is never any mistaking the unaccountable thrill that some music can give me, whatever category of music it supposedly belongs in.



This set has just been given to me as a birthday present by one of the children, who are now of course adults. The idea is apparently to take me out of my classical comfort zone, but if one thing has consistently struck me in half a century of hearing pop music it is just how conservative it is in certain ways. The harmonisation would in general have seemed unenterprising to composers in the year 1700, yet this is the kind of music that millions really listen to and are really affected by. From this I have to draw the conclusion that a simple harmony that lasts unaltered through untold numbers of changes of musical fashion, style and idiom can hardly be thought of as outmoded, whatever the earnest intellectual theories of the 20th century.



George Michael has apparently composed most of the music here himself, and I certainly seem to detect a resemblance in the style of many of the numbers. Unsurprisingly, I like some of them better than some others, and still none matches up to Careless Whisper for me. Bottom of the charts for me is the joint number with Elton John 'Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me', I have to say. However something that does a lot for even the items that interest me less from a musical viewpoint is George Michael's voice. This is really most striking and distinctive in its higher register, a fine tenor sound that will continue to keep me listening to songs that would not hold my attention otherwise.



Whether I was in that much of a musical comfort zone I rather doubt, but the matter is not for me to judge. I am not at all comfortable with some 20th century 'classical' music and I am rarely uncomfortable with the pops, even if only intermittently interested. This set is going to be chiefly background music for me, I'm sure, but it's mainly new music to me at the moment. I'm not shaken in the least although I genuinely am stirred up to a point. Why should that be otherwise? It's music innit?"