{"product_id":"george-michael-a-life-lived-loud-loved-hard-and-gone-too-soon","title":"George Michael: A Life Lived Loud, Loved Hard, And Gone Too Soon","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e \u003cspan\u003eGeorge Michael was not just a singer. George Michael was not just a pop star. George Michael was the kind of human being that the world produces maybe once in a lifetime, a person whose voice could reach through a speaker and touch something so deep inside you that you forgot for a moment that you were a stranger listening to a stranger. This is the book that finally tells the whole truth about George Michael, from the chubby self conscious Greek Cypriot boy growing up in the quiet suburbs of Hertfordshire who could not yet see what he was becoming, to the global phenomenon who sold over one hundred million records and made the entire world stop and listen every single time he opened his mouth. George Michael grew up in a household where hard work was the religion and where a Greek Cypriot father who had come to England with nothing pushed his children to build something that would last. That boy became one half of Wham!, the most joyful and explosive pop duo of the 1980s, before walking away from it all at the height of his fame and reinventing himself as a solo artist of such staggering depth and ability that even the people who thought they already knew who George Michael was found themselves completely unprepared for what he had become. The album Faith alone sold twenty five million copies and changed the sound and the temperature of an entire era of popular music, but George Michael was never satisfied with just success. He wanted truth. He wanted freedom. He wanted to make music on his own terms even when that desire put him at war with one of the most powerful record labels on the planet, even when it cost him years of his creative life and millions of dollars in legal fees, even when the whole industry was telling him to just play the game and be grateful. George Michael refused to be grateful for anything less than the full version of himself and that refusal, painful and costly and magnificent as it was, is at the heart of everything you are about to read in these pages.\u003cbr\u003eBut George Michael was so much more than his music and his battles and his record sales and his reinventions and that is precisely what makes this biography unlike anything you have read before about him or about anyone like him. George Michael loved deeply and George Michael lost devastatingly and the combination of those two things shaped every single song he ever wrote in ways that most listeners never fully understood until now. Inside these pages you will read about Anselmo Feleppa, the man George Michael loved completely and lost to HIV related illness in 1993, a love story so tender and so heartbreaking that it will stay with you long after you finish this book. You will read about the album Older, which George Michael made in the ruins of that grief, quietly pouring his devastation into some of the most beautiful music of the entire decade while the world around him had no idea what they were actually listening to. You will read about the death of his mother Lesley, who was the warmth at the center of George Michael's private world, and about the specific darkness that descended after he lost her so close to losing Anselmo. You will read about the long complicated relationship with Kenny Goss and what love looks like when you choose it again after it has already broken you once. You will read about the 1998 Beverly Hills arrest that forced George Michael out of a closet he had been living in for his entire adult life, and about the extraordinary way he responded to that forced exposure, not with shame and not with silence but with a music video and a level of defiant humor that left the people trying to humiliate him with absolutely nowhere to go.\u003c\/span\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Books Prime","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45914158071999,"sku":"d79c8e64-f780-46c1-b150-5e345f1c4656","price":26.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0761\/7550\/7647\/files\/907ca8a8949ba4c9e21c9fa3ac2552d6.jpg?v=1785055235","url":"https:\/\/books-prime.com\/products\/george-michael-a-life-lived-loud-loved-hard-and-gone-too-soon","provider":"Books Prime","version":"1.0","type":"link"}