“So I think in terms of my work, I’ve never been reticent in terms of defining my sexuality.” “The songs that I wrote when I was with women were really about women, and the songs that I’ve written since have been fairly obviously about men,” he said. When he did come out in public, shortly after having been arrested for lewd behavior in a public restroom, eight years after “Freedom ’90,” Michael said his sexuality was an enigma, even to him, but his music was always honest.
It sounds almost like a coming-out anthem: “I think there’s something you should know / I think it’s time I told you so / There’s something deep inside of me / There’s someone else I’ve got to be.” In the song, Michael is himself, an artist speaking directly to his fans about the lie of fame, promising to no longer play by its rules. No more coded messages about lovers and exes. Then, of course, there’s “Freedom ’90,” the funkiest song on an album filled with plaintive ballads about war and pain.
It’s not hard to tell, though, why it was once a modest hit, with its simple, buoyant melody, ’80s-friendly “doo-doo-doos,” and its teen-candy message of eternal devotion in the face of heartbreak. Older fans of George Michael already knew the fact I discovered as I was unraveling this mystery as a kid, that “Freedom ’90” was Michael’s second song called “Freedom.” The first-recorded with Andrew Ridgeley while he was a member of Wham!-is now fairly described as a deep cut, unmentioned in every karaoke songbook I’ve seen. The year suggested in the song’s title felt like a clue to the song’s deeper meaning, to Michael himself, and perhaps to larger mysteries I could only guess at. It wasn’t hard to infer from the song that Michael was making some sort of layered statement about his celebrity, but as a kid in the days before Google, it was difficult to parse the meaning of that statement. Famously, Michael himself was barely in it instead, a parade of supermodels-and a random, shapely, half-naked man hanging from his gravity boots-lip-synch the lyrics to the song as icons of his earlier stardom (a leather jacket, a jukebox, a guitar) spontaneously combust. The video for “Freedom! ’90,” directed by David Fincher, was inescapable during my tween years.
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