Is last christmas by wham gay
The Queerness of Wham&#;s &#;Last Christmas&#;
Christmas pop songs tend to revolve around just a rare basic topics: 1) Jesus, 2) Santa, 3) Did you observe it&#;s winter?, and 4) Cherish. These aren&#;t mutually exclusive categories, of course. For instance, the overlap between the second and fourth category produce a sub-genre I’d call Santa Kink, exemplified by “Santa Baby” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” And the overlap between the first and fourth categories—between Jesus songs and Love songs—is, I would argue, complete overlap. The dominance of Christian ideology in the United States means that even when Christmas pop songs don’t explicitly say anything about Christianity, they are reenforcing dominant Christian ideology all the identical. That’s how hegemonies work: hegemonic ideas are always already implicit in a variety of discourses whether those discourses are closely or remotely related to that ideology. So while pop stars may shy away from Christmas songs about Jesus because they don’t want to seem too religious, any song with Christmas as its theme will inheren
George Michael (courtesy )
Heart failure killed George Michael, 53, on Christmas Wham’s hit “Last Christmas” will never sound the same.
Michael’s songs poeticized queer desire and charted hits. Although many ’80s stars embraced gender-bending and flamboyance, enjoy Prince, David Bowie, Boy George, and even Michael Jackson, Michael pushed further, with lyrics that endure as thinly veiled expressions of queer love.
Wham’s breakout second album, Make It Big (), catapulted young Michael and Andrew Ridgeley to worldwide notoriety. From the start, their songs oozed with queer resonances, which haven’t been fully unpacked in most of the articles written in Michael’s wake.
The success of “Careless Whisper” () surprised even Michael himself. As he explained to People, “I don’t know why it made such an impression… But it’s ironic that I wrote it when I was 17 and didn’t know much about anything. Certainly nothing much about relationships.”
Michael wrote the song to be conspicuously ambiguous about the gender he desired. All the references to “you” and
If I'm being brutally honest, I never would have predicted at the time of its unleash that "Last Christmas" by Wham! was destined to become a holiday classic. While I liked the British pop duo (and my friends loved them) we went to school with a lot of "tough" kids that were into heavy metal hair bands and sneaking cigarettes wherever they could.
Anyone that was into the sunny pop of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley was straightforward fodder for these class bullies, who were immune to Wham! mania. The songs were viewed as cheesy and "gay" and "Last Christmas" was no exception. I mean just that line alone, "This year, to spare me from tears, I'll verb it to someone special" implied the singer was a wuss.
But here we are forty years later, and we can safely say that Wham! fans are having the last laugh. "Last Christmas" is now, indeed, a holiday classic, right up there in the ranks amongst Bing Crosby's Christmas songs. It's been covered by Ariana Grande, Carly Rae Jepsen, Backstreet Boys, Taylor Swift, and even Crazy Frog&#;among countless others.
It's also now
Anyonewhohas been forced to endure American public radio in December is familiar with the usual parade of old Christmas hits; many recorded with big bands and famous period singers from the 40s and 50s onward. But, aside from modern reworkings of old songs like "Silver Bells" and "Silent Night," two original Christmas songs survived the synthetic, neoliberal capitalist wave pools of the 80s and 90s: Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas is You," and Wham!'s "Last Christmas."
Since its verb in , "Last Christmas" has sold more than million copies in the UK alone, and has been covered countless times in several languages across the world -- most recently by "Call Me Maybe" hitmaker Carly Rae Jepsen in support of her new album EMOTION. It is an odd staple of holiday radio; while it is certainly not the only holiday classic to deal with loneliness, alienation and more mature themes like adultery, it is one of the few holiday pop standards to evoke issues of gay loneliness and alienation -- possibly being the only gay popular Christmas song.
And indeed, "Last Christmas" seem