Stefan Molyneux offers his thoughts on the passing of George Michael, the trappings of fame and the danger of living a life dependent upon the approval of strangers. Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi everybody, it's Devan Wall on Newton Vita Main Radio. | |
| Kind of sad that a glorious musical presence has vanished from the world, you know, snuffed out by the two wet fingers of eternity on the candle of mortality. | |
| And that's, I guess, Prince and David Bowie and George Michael passing away this year. | |
| Often slow, self-inflicted addictions. | |
| I guess with David Bowie it was to cigarettes. | |
| With Prince it was to painkillers. | |
| And with George Michael, well, it was pretty much everything he could get his hands on. | |
| We'll get to that in a second. | |
| But a glorious, glorious voice. | |
| A good performer and a great songwriter. | |
| I think often underrated as a songwriter. | |
| He did a lot of variety, you know, kind of hip-hop kind of stuff, and he did some great duets with himself on the Faith album, and soulful ballads, and some rocking stuff, and contemplative and self-reflective. | |
| I remember listening to, listen without prejudice, with Freedom 90. | |
| I may get some of this stuff mixed up, but I'm pretty sure it's fairly Fairly okay. | |
| And in it, he says, look, when I was in Wham!, I was, you know, intentionally, you know, when you shake your ass, they notice fast, right? | |
| I mean, I was... | |
| But I now want to be taken seriously, because he said, you know, I've got to believe in the sound. | |
| It's the one good thing that I've got. | |
| And that's kind of tragic, too, that the only thing you have to bring to the world is a musical ability, which is great. | |
| You know, of course, it brings people a lot of pleasure, but it's the one good thing that I've got, I think, is sort of a sad statement of a low self-regard. | |
| And this... | |
| Is, I think, really something important to understand. | |
| That these people appear very confident. | |
| And the same is true in politics as well. | |
| Politicians come up there and do these speeches and so on and withstand the blows of the press if they're on the right. | |
| We stand like a sort of fading lollipop being licked to death by the press if they're on the left. | |
| But these are not confident people. | |
| And you can tell a lot of times by their personal relationships. | |
| How are they doing in their personal relationships? | |
| Well, George Michael came out to some people when he was 19 and In the tight-panted electric boogalow sat on a happy cactus smile in the video for Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, came out to everyone else with half a brain and half an eye. | |
| Ooh, that guy's pretty tanned and peroxided and really enjoys short shorts and is prancing around like an elf on cocaine. | |
| Well, I guess he came out more officially later on. | |
| He was kind of outed in a very seedy way as gay. | |
| In 1998, he was caught soliciting sex in a stinky-ass public toilet, and that's how he was outed. | |
| And he had quite a few brushes with the law, particularly because of substance abuse and driving. | |
| He was sentenced to eight weeks in prison, served four weeks for driving his car into a shop in London while under the influence, and he was also caught with crack cocaine and all these kinds of things. | |
| So that is a very interesting and tragic thing. | |
| You know, everybody wants fame. | |
| Everybody wants fame. | |
| And he said once, he said, I'm also sure that most people find it hard to believe that stardom can make you miserable. | |
| After all, everybody wants to be a star. | |
| I certainly did. | |
| And I worked hard to get it, but I was miserable and I don't want to feel that way again. | |
| We admire these people. | |
| They look very glamorous, you know. | |
| They're tan, dressed to the nines on red carpet events, you know, beautiful, often talented as hell. | |
| And it looks so compelling. | |
| It looks so exciting, and it looks so, like, We envy them. | |
| We want to be them. | |
| But that's from the outside. | |
| These people, famous people, are really trapped by our regard. | |
| Because, you know, they can't just go out and walk the streets. | |
| They just can't go out. | |
| George Michael was in an interview saying that he went on a vacation to an island for four days. | |
| And he said, now basically everyone on that island has my autograph. | |
| And that's all he's got to do. | |
| He's got to smile until your skull is aching from the smilingness. | |
| And you may be bad-tempered, you may be anxious about something, but you're aware, of course, particularly now with cell phones and video, you know, you snap once at a fan and it's all over the internet and it's like, George Michael lashes out at fan and, you know, that can cost you a huge amount of money and all of your handlers are going to be upset with you and The press is going to try and tear you apart because, you know, the press will just do anything to get eyeballs. | |
| They are the modern print version of the old public executions that used to occur in Europe and I guess still do occur in some areas of the world. | |
| So it's tough, you know, you're trapped in your hotel room a lot. | |
| There's a story of Falco, the Austrian quote singer, late, I guess he died driving into a bus in the Dominican Republic, but he went on tour in Japan. | |
| And he stayed in his hotel room for like five days. | |
| He couldn't go out and just became more friends with the minibar. | |
| And these kinds of addictions, very, very common in the realm of art. | |
| It's a high-wire act. | |
| You know, you get there. | |
| Falco, when Rachmi Amadeus went to number one, was told in a bar and someone said, hey, let's celebrate. | |
| And he said, he just burst into tears. | |
| And he said, well, now I've done it, I'll never be able to do it again. | |
| And this kind of insecurity is really tough for a lot of people. | |
| But they look so confident out there, commanding the stage, striding back and forth. | |
| But in their personal relationships, in general, it's pretty wretched. | |
| Falco supposedly fathered a daughter, but as it turned out, a paternity test showed he wasn't the father. | |
| And this kind of heartbreak is... | |
| Pretty important. | |
| George Michael had a series of relationships, some of which were pretty negative, some of which were pretty rough, and he couldn't tell the truth to his own mother about being gay, because he was worried that his mother would worry that he would die of AIDS, because, of course, that was the big thing at the time, and it still is to some degree, or certainly in certain places in the world. | |
| And so he had to sort of bury his own sexuality. | |
| He didn't really come out much until he was in his mid-twenties and didn't really have a serious relationship until he was 27. | |
| That's kind of passed the gate in a lot of ways. | |
| Although, George Michael, like Freddie Mercury, was involved with women beforehand, which I was fine. | |
| Well, I don't really understand it. | |
| I wouldn't be like, well, I could date a guy or I could date a girl, but, you know, that's just, you know, I guess I'm sort of one way inclined. | |
| And George Michael, of course, also famously was a marijuana addict. | |
| He'd smoke up to 25 joints a day. | |
| And that's like unfiltered cigarettes on this glorious God tube of a voice. | |
| And that, to me, seems very tragic as well. | |
| What an abuse of a gift you've been given that can, you know, a guy sold over 100 million albums. | |
| That seems pretty important to protect that. | |
| But same thing with Freddie Mercury, that Freddie was a chain smoker sometimes and just treated his voice like crap, never took a singing lesson. | |
| And had constant problems with his voice, and George Michael also had problems with his voice. | |
| It's a pretty stressful thing, you know, when you have millions and millions of dollars resting on something you can't really control, your voice. | |
| I mean, it's pretty stressful, and George Michael did say that it was very stressful when he was younger. | |
| Now he relaxes, when he was touring with an orchestra, he relaxes a little bit more and can enjoy it more, but it's a very stressful thing to have all of that. | |
| And also, George Michael had a pretty famously troubled relationship with his own father. | |
| And I've got a quote here. | |
| He said, I never really told my parents that I wanted to be a pop star or anything. | |
| They just knew that I was totally obsessed with music. | |
| Funnily enough, my father always used to say that he didn't think I could sing. | |
| Well, I mean, of course, that's, I mean, what a glorious vocalist he was. | |
| And I mean, if you want to see some amazing vocals, watch George Michael at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert after Freddie died, doing a glorious rendition of my favorite song in the whole world, Somebody to Love, and even hitting the falsetto at the end, although declining to do that tumbled down Vocal dip that happens right after the falsetto instead deferring it to the audience. | |
| That's okay. | |
| I've only done that once or twice successfully in my whole life. | |
| Although Freddie would rip that off in concert without any problems. | |
| So his father didn't think he could sing. | |
| Sort of reminds me of Paul Simon singing to his father in a car and his father saying he can't sing at all. | |
| But that's of course because the older generation was used to baritones, right? | |
| The Frank Sinatra kind of thing. | |
| And so they were used to more masculine vocalists. | |
| And then when you have to fill stadiums and the high-piercing tenors can fill the stadiums and be more audible over the music. | |
| When I went to see Billy Idol when I was young, it was hard to hear it because, you know, whereas you go hear someone like Sting, it's pretty easy to hear because those piercing vocals can be amplified much more easily than a baritone, which is one of the reasons why, along with not wanting to... | |
| Like, sort of the girly high-voiced singers like... | |
| Like George Michael, like Justin Bieber, and so on. | |
| They're not sexually threatening to girls, and they're very pretty, and so they've got that androgynous thing going on. | |
| So that, of course, has occurred. | |
| Girls seem to spend their whole lives looking for boyfriends rather than husbands and providers these days. | |
| So that's one of the things that works that way. | |
| So I sort of wanted to mention, because... | |
| Famous people are sort of the new pantheon of demigods in the world these days, and don't envy these people's lives. | |
| They are trapped by our regard. | |
| They can't go out, and they don't have a lot of objective people in their lives. | |
| See, when you become famous, The people who are around you after you're famous only know you as you being famous and maybe they want to rub off like fame whores on some of that fame aura or maybe they want things from you they want favors they want money they want to launch their own career so you don't know when you're famous why people want to be around you and of course some people are purely mercenary and I don't mean this in a negative way I mean you need an agent and people got to book your concerts and people astound engineers want you to come in and record so they can get paid and so everybody wants | |
| your Your energy, your dedication, your focus, your productivity, so that they can get paid. | |
| And that is hard to be objective with people around you. | |
| Should you tour? | |
| Well, there's lots of people who are going to make millions of dollars. | |
| If you do, what's their advice to you going to be? | |
| What's going to be to tour? | |
| And they're going to try and encourage you and get you to do that and so on. | |
| It's kind of tough. | |
| You know, a lot of people who are famous are very sensitive. | |
| I mean, certainly to be a sensitive singer, to be a sensitive songwriter, I mean, you've got to wear your heart on your sleeve to some degree. | |
| And it's tough to say no. | |
| George Michael says this, I'm too nice, I don't say no. | |
| And so when you have sensitivity and talent and a public-facing moneymaker, well, then people are going to be trying to mine that resource all the time, trying to mine that resource all the time. | |
| Now, people who were with you before you became famous, well, they at least have a relationship with you prior to fame, but your lives are so different. | |
| You've diverged into like multi-million selling album rock sex god and they're doing whatever they're doing and it's not going to be good. | |
| That's always going to be there. | |
| So fame is a distancer from people in many ways and that's really, really important to remember. | |
| You get stuff, you get adulation, but you lose love, you lose connection. | |
| For most, not for all. | |
| And just look at the children of celebrities to see how this plays out. | |
| And did George Michael, was he surrounded by loved ones? | |
| Did he have a lot of love in his life? | |
| Well, no, he couldn't have. | |
| He couldn't have. | |
| When you're smoking 25 joints a day, you're just like a walking, high-voiced haze of marijuana smoke. | |
| You're not there. | |
| What's there is the drugs. | |
| What's there is whatever you're putting into your body that eclipses your actual personality. | |
| You're not there anymore. | |
| Is there somebody to love? | |
| No, there's nobody there to love. | |
| And there's somebody there to admire. | |
| Ooh, great voice. | |
| I love this song, but that's not the person. | |
| That's not the person. | |
| The product is not the person. | |
| And that, I think, is really, really important to understand because we all face these choices. | |
| I guess we're not all offered massive tours with an orchestra or anything, but we are all offered choices of stuff For self, right? | |
| Stuff for self. | |
| I'll give you stuff if you just give up some of yourself. | |
| I'll give you money. | |
| I'll give you glory. | |
| I'll give you fame. | |
| I'll give you power in return for your soul. | |
| It's the ancient, of course, example of the devil. | |
| And we all get offered that. | |
| There are people who often resent others who sell out, but that's just because they never got offered a good price, I think. | |
| So we will be offered these things in our life. | |
| You will be offered at one point or at many points in your life. | |
| It certainly happened to me where people will sit you down and say, we will give you all of this glorious stuff in return for your integrity, in return for your identity, in return for love. | |
| Stuff for love, stuff for self. | |
| It's a dangerous, dangerous bargain. | |
| And we can see where it leads. | |
| It leads to a man dying at the young age of 53. | |
| I know it seems old to a lot of you, but it's really not. | |
| Young age of 53, he dies. | |
| Now, to what degree did his drug addictions and other addictions work on his heart? | |
| If it was his heart failure, I guess we'll find out after an autopsy. | |
| But it's a young man to die and a talent to be ripped from the world. | |
| He fought with Sony like crazy. | |
| He didn't record for years because Sony had a recording contract that he hated. | |
| He fought with them for years. | |
| And then ended up signing with Sony again. | |
| Oh, what's the point? | |
| What's the point? | |
| Just go make your music. | |
| But it's important to remember that and to view these people's lives as I'm glad he lived. | |
| I'm glad he made his music. | |
| I wish he'd been happier. | |
| And I think if he'd been happier, I think it would have come across in his music more. | |
| But he did choose promiscuity, I think, over love. | |
| He did choose fame over identity. | |
| He did choose stuff over self. | |
| And I think that is really tragic. | |
| Don't do it when you're offered that. | |
| It's fine to accumulate stuff, but you must do it with integrity. | |
| You don't want to die alone in a bed. | |
| I would say substantially unloved by peers and used by those who want you to perform like a seal for money. | |
| That is a terrible, terrible bargain. | |
| And I just wanted to remind you of that. | |
| Don't envy these people. | |
| It's a very, very hard life. | |
| It's a very eviscerating and empty life. | |
| And we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. | |
| But I don't think we have to love the process that they have to go through to get their stuff out into the public. | |
| It's pretty brutal and it's pretty gruesome. | |
| And when the devil comes up to you and says, I offer thee the world in return for the self. | |
| Keep the self. | |
| That's where the gold is. | |
| That's where the love is. | |
| That's where the future of the world must be. | |
| Say no to stuff. | |
| Say yes to self. | |
| That's the only tribute we can pay. | |
| To a pretty tormented man who died much too young. | |
| This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Rest in peace, George. |