This morning, I looked up George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90” video with the intent of just letting a semi-forgotten song play as I started to work. I had never noticed the pointed nature of the title of the song: it bears an exclamation point, a nod to his former band, Wham!, which also had a song called “Freedom,” hence the year number in the title of “Freedom! ’90.” Michael is snarkily differentiating the “now” from the “then.”
As the song played, I found that I couldn’t take my eyes off the video, and I realized that the “now” isn’t what it used to be.
The video was made in the days before Tyra Banks demystified the “supermodel.” Here, we are treated to images of Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington, with all those angular cheekbones playing in some wonderfully dramatic lighting.
The video itself is one of those things you look at as a former art student and think, “damn, I need to take more pictures.” The lighting is amazing: warm and golden one minute, cold and blue the next. Any movement in the shot appears to play in a shower of light, causing a delicious array of light and shadow. Everything is about steam, sensual lip-syncing and jukeboxes exploding exactly on-beat. It is everything that music video was meant to be: dramatic, inspiring, beautiful. It is not simply a marketing tool, hoping to sell us music by selling us tits and ass: it is a series of well-crafted images that cause us to wish that our own lives could be that cool.
When this video came out, there was a big to-do about how Michael, still hot and riding the sex symbol wave started with “Faith,” did not appear in the video. It didn’t matter. Director David Fincher had delivered a gorgeous love letter to light. It was then and still is one of my favorite videos of all time, from an era when music videos were still art…and models could still be “super.”
Four-Door Handbasket 