Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1
Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 is the second solo studio album by the English singer-songwriter George Michael, released on 3 September 1990 by Columbia Records (Epic Records in the UK). The album was Michael's final album of all-new material on Columbia until 2004's Patience. Listen Without Prejudice was a stark departure from Michael's previous album, 1987's Faith, with largely acoustic instrumentation and a sombre intensity in many of the lyrics and melodies. While the album topped the UK Albums Chart, disappointing sales in the United States led to Michael's legal battles against Sony Music, in which he accused the corporation of not fully supporting him as an artist.[2]
Listen Without Prejudice was reissued across a number of formats on 20 October 2017 and again topped the UK Albums Chart, 27 years after it first reached number one on the chart.
Production[edit]
After the massive success of George Michael's 1987 album Faith, expectations for his follow-up album were also high. Michael wanted to be taken more seriously as a songwriter,[3] which resulted in a more thoughtful, often moody recording.
Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 is largely devoted to ballads and folk-styled rock songs, although there are a few dance tracks like "Freedom! '90" and "Soul Free". There was also a remix of "Freedom! '90" that incorporated elements of Soul II Soul's "Back to Life", which was released as a twelve-inch single and received a good deal of club play. Like Faith, each track was produced and arranged by Michael himself.
Legacy[edit]
Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.[30] In 2003, Slant Magazine's Sal Cinquemani called the album "a starkly personal statement that effectively set the artist's professional downfall into motion", suggesting that its "overall heaviness" failed to resonate with listeners expecting uptempo material in the vein of Michael's past work; he concluded that "the fact that there was never a Vol. 2, which was rumored to be the feel-good dance record said fans were probably waiting for, makes this one seem all the more sacred."[1] AllMusic reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine found the album flawed, noting that Michael downplays his gift for "effortless hooks and melodies" and that his "socially conscious lyrics tend to be heavy-handed", but concluded that its best songs "make a case for his talents as a pop craftsman."[20]
Reviewing the album's 2017 reissue, Pitchfork writer Alfred Soto situated Listen Without Prejudice in the context of the then-burgeoning HIV/AIDS pandemic: "[George Michael] understood black music as the product of a familiarity with death leavened by the banalities of earth: love, sex, comfort. Something was happening that autumn to gay artists closeted from their fans. In October [1990], Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe released Behaviour, the quietest album of the Pet Shop Boys' career. The unceasing piling up of bodies killed by HIV had made, for the moment, the bacchanal into a gauche if not repulsive gesture of sentimentality."[25] According to Soto: "For those of us too young for the plague years—who can imagine, at least, a life lived instead of convulsing in agony on a hospital bed—chastising Michael for leaning on elegies and ballads in 1990 strikes me as glib. In its original form, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 was the follow-up that Faith demanded; in this new incarnation, it's a miscellany unruffled by notions of coherence, an attempt to make art out of George Michael's quarrels with himself."[25]