It's been a month since George Michael was found dead on Christmas Day, and it's still unclear how he died. I, for one, don't care—nor do I get why some people are hounded, exposed, and punished for every detail of their (consensual) personal lives, while others can outright brag about serial sexual assault and their only punishment is becoming the most powerful person on the planet. I Googled "How did George Michael die" this morning, and the universal presumption seems to be drugs. But the Google result that really made me happy was this petition to establish a bench in George Michael's honor in a cruisy park he liked.

Reportedly, it would be "a special bench placed in Hampstead Heath, where he would often meet sexual partners for X-rated fun." Oh, c'mon, stop being such a normie: sign the petition.

And while you're thinking about George Michael, I recommend reading Megan Mayhew Bergman's piece for The Paris Review about formative childhood experiences involving the guy's music. She writes:

Like most children, I mined my world for meaning. In the afternoons, I would turn on my Fisher-Price record player, sit cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom with a busty Barbie, and listen to the pleading “Careless Whisper” sax solo over and over again, hoping that obsession was the first step toward mastery.

That sentence is the best evocation—the best explanation—of childhood I've read in a while. Like the author, I grew up in a repressed religious environment, one only occasionally enlivened by beams of beguiling otherness (like George Michael songs) that somehow managed to break through mainstream messaging. (Also, I liked playing with dolls.) As Bergman writes of her early George Michael fandom:

We were looking for someone other than Jesus to take us into the world of sex.

And:

Pop music, for me, became intellectual foreplay, the only current I heard on a daily basis running counter to the message from the pulpit.

George Michael had a layered, coded, clever style of playing with sexuality and religion. He was irreverent in ways that most people weren't prepared for. It was only as an adult, re-listening to Faith— and in particular "Father Figure," but also the title track, "I Want Your Sex" and "One More Try"—that I realized Christianity itself is the biggest daddy-boy love story of all time. How come no one ever talks about it like that? Christians are in love with the Son, the Son does everything out of love for the Father, and everyone loves the Father because of the ways he uses the Son. Whoa. As incest stories go, it's even weirder than Star Wars.

It's amazing that a pop star during the Reagan era got away with making work about all this. A song like "Faith" is so good, you can put it as the first track on an album and smuggle anything into the minds of the masses. George Michael's attitude toward freedom, his unapologetic stance about who he was, was part of his life's work, something he had to invent as he went along, something gay pop stars weren't allowed to do before him. As Bergman puts it:

George Michael developed a savvy, knowing approach to his genre and the demanding performance of normalcy, which at first he gave willingly, then subverted, and finally outright rejected. I watch Michael’s early interviews and marvel at how well he managed the dissonance between his public and private selves.

As for the way George Michael's music sounds in the Trump era, Bergman writes:

The new presidential administration seems eager to keep women ensconced as objects, pretty airbrushed things to be judged onstage and grabbed at will, paid less along the way. I crave narratives that allow people to be more than what they are, stories that allow women to be more than a wife or mother, to challenge the prison of the white picket fence, to have full agency, to state and act on desire as they really feel it—without apology.

Hear, hear.

• Now for a Side Note to Karaoke Enthusiasts Considering Honoring the Late Pop Star by Singing "Careless Whisper"

You probably can't. The guy had range, and if you can't jump the octaves like he was capable of doing, the song loses its essential texture. If you have amazing pipes, go ahead knock yourself out on the solo George Michael version. But if you have a normal mid-range singing voice, I recommend Wham!'s "Careless Whisper," which I'll embed below. It still has that sax, it still has the words you know and love, but the verses are scrambled in a way that makes singing them much easier (although not that easy—you still need a bit of falsetto). Bonus: an amazing karaoke video to go with it.

• The Easiest, Best, Most Crowd-Pleasing George Michael Karaoke Jam

...is and always will be "Faith."