WOEBOT

I've always liked Boy George so I come not here to gloat. My, this man's career in the spotlight has been tumultuous! Even since the spectacular fireworks of Culture Club and his very publicly denounced Heroin habit we've had a number of George O'Dowds, the George who slipped into the Acid House slipstream and gave us the More Protein label and MC Kinky, the comfortable, suave, middle-aged man ensconced in his palatial home off Hampstead Heath and finally the New York-based, slightly-deranged, gonzoid individual behind a Broadway flop, the bizarre investigation into a misplaced call to the police (shades of mental instability) and subsequent photo-call street sweeping.

I can't help but wish George, for his own sake, had pushed the pause button five or six years before and didn't go to the States. I know Culture Club were massive over there but that was in the nascent days of MTV, at the height of New Pop and probably the last time British Music made a sizable impact in the USA. As it seems everyone but George knew, the mid-eighties backlash against the supposedly quasi-homosexual values which his era of pop embodied was irrevocable and total.

Even more than a band like REM whose earthy, heterosexual-masculine* Byrds-revisionism came to define the underground (you could even argue the SST school was subsumed within its vision), that Bruce Springsteen encapsulated this return to "real" values. When I see George being made to sweep the gutters of Manhattan I flash on both his failure to understand that America will always seek to punish him for leading it aesthetically astray and also on those early publicity shots of Springsteen walking the streets** of his hood Asbury Park, New Jersey.

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* Ironic in the light of Michael Stipe's sexuality perhaps?
** Notice the guy stooping in the background.....