Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 2 January 2017 issue)

Dear Kam,
When will 2016 end? I can’t take it any more.
At wits’ end

The year 2016 has been like the Death Star before the Rebel Alliance managed to find out how to destroy it. It has been a fairly awful year in politics and for famous people, leading somebody to coin the term “Starmageddon” because stars like David Bowie and now George Michael have died.

I’m travelling overseas, so I’m not in Malaysia right now; and because I have been on the move, I haven’t been watching or reading the news at all, which has been great. In fact, not knowing the local or world news has been the best holiday imaginable. That and the surprising discovery that the food on board Malaysia Airlines has become not only edible but actually, quite good.

This year’s devastating power did manage to break through my anti-news shield with the news of Michael but otherwise I am still on course to complete the Kessel Run in less than 12 par secs without discovering what crazy thing Donald Trump has done now. While I am on holiday, I have decided to assume that the prime minister will continue increasing his already unbreakable grip on power and that Trump will do and say dangerous things. And I am just going to have a good time. I’ll wake up when I go-go back home.

Dear Kam,
George Michael has died? What is going on?
GH Faith

I was never a huge fan of George Michael but I admired him enormously. Although he appeared to have been a terrible driver (he was always in the news for crashing his car), he was a great songwriter who had real star power, which is becoming increasingly rare. I came of age in the 1980s and his music was in the background all the time. Growing up on the litter-strewn and often violent streets of England, I could understand the appeal of his escapist message of fun and glamour, but it was a bit too shallow for me, even if his music was exceptionally toe-tappingly catchy.

I admire Michael because, like David Bowie, he was not only supremely talented but also single-minded and clear-sighted in his pursuit of becoming a star. For both of them — despite their talent — their rise was unlikely. Bowie had tried every angle to success in the late 1960s before he finally hit the big time by dressing up as an alien. And for Michael, his pathway should have been blocked before it even began because he was not only secretly Greek but also secretly gay, at a time when neither was hip.

The 1980s was the decade of exclamation marks and at the same time that Michael and his friend Andrew Ridgeley burst onto the scene with their band Wham!, there was a TV show called Fame! that told the stories of talented young people trying to make it big in the arts in New York. Fame (I’m dropping the exclamation marks because they are confusing my autocorrect) led to a massive trend in wearing dancer’s leg-warmers and soon, I was surrounded by young people (mostly girls) who dressed as if going to a Broadway audition and thought that the key to becoming a star was to prance around in the streets of a provincial town. Meanwhile, Michael knew differently.

In the early days with Wham, he surrounded himself with the eye-candy of two female dancers and the very pretty Ridgeley. They looked like a fun-loving gang that every young person wanted to join and few suspected that it was all being choreographed and engineered, not by a record company but by the slightly chubby Greek guy who had changed his name to George Michael.

As time went by, it became increasingly clear that Michael was the driving force and nobody knew what Ridgeley actually did. He pretended to play a guitar, but he couldn’t play a guitar. He appeared to be singing, but you could never hear his voice. He was an old school friend but otherwise he appeared to be a completely redundant aspect of Michael’s evolution … like a tonsil, the removal of which was a popular medical procedure in the 1980s.

And yet Ridgeley served a very important purpose in Michael’s early pursuit of stardom. He was very pretty and he attracted the young girl fans at a time when the secretly gay Michael was unsure of his own sex appeal because young girls were unlikely to swoon over a gay man. Not only was Ridgeley bait for the all-important female fan base but also his lack of any discernible talent appealed to the fiction that anybody can become a star, which was a useful shield behind which to hide Michael’s vast ambition that might have appeared unattractive if he had been exposed on the stage alone.

It is a scientific fact that music was better in the past. Now, we live in an age of disposable boy bands that have been concocted in a laboratory by a behind-the-scenes Svengali like Simon Cowell, who learnt how to manipulate the young fans by watching original masters like Michael.

A songwriting and performing talent like Michael is exceptionally rare — and he did it all by himself, which has to be admired. A blisteringly powerful song like Freedom can easily stand alongside Frank Sinatra’s My Way as a 20th century anthem.

I’m in England and on the day before Christmas, every radio station was playing Last Christmas. Nobody imagined that the news of Michael’s early death would be announced just two days later.

With the deaths of Bowie and now Michael, 2016 has been a devastating year, but perhaps it has helped to remind us what true talent looks and sounds like and that for talent to be manifested requires hard work, cleverness and risk-taking.

Reprinted with the kind permission of