George Michael
“I Want Your Sex (Freemasons Vocal Club Mix)”
Sony, September 2010
promo release, as best I can tell
Does music make you laugh? It makes me laugh a lot, and I can’t remember the last time I laughed about a song as hard as I laughed over this one. As I heard it for the first time I was just chortling, out of sheer joy. Laughing is an involuntary “hooray!” a lot of the time, a physical “right on!”, and that’s what it is in this case. Every time this ten-minute-plus dance remix of George Michael’s seminally (pun intended; it always is) direct paean to the physical pleasures of monogamy took things just a little higher, just a little further; every time it re-cut and looped together his multi-tracked vocals to say “Everybody in the ‘hood, everybody should”; every time it just repeated the word “sex!” at intervals; when it slowed down to do a full-fledged ’80s-funk remix of the song as we know it; when it added a goddamn horn section, because apparently the original was insufficiently celebratory and flamboyant; when it kicked back into the four-on-the-floor crowd-killing temp it started with…every time it did one of those things, it demonstrated a willingness to have as good a time as it possibly could at every opportunity. To go all the way, if you will. (Those familiar with Michael’s oeuvre might compare it to that crowd-goes-wild moment at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert where his band suddenly morphed the bassline from “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” into the bassline for “Killer.”) In so doing it turned a come-on into a party, a strut into a parade. Hooray! Right on! LOL!
(Via Chris Conroy.)