George Michael^†

Wham! got their break because another act dropped out of Top of the Pops in 1982, and "Young Guns" jumped from nowhere to the top three. Two years later, Make It Big put three number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100. He could've ridden that wave for a decade. Instead, he killed Wham! at their peak and bet everything on Faith, an album he wrote, produced, and played almost entirely himself. It sold over 20 million copies, won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and topped Billboard's Black Albums chart. Almost no white solo artist had done that before him. Four number ones from a single album. He'd made the right call.

The Sony lawsuit defined his nineties more than any album did. He called his contract "professional slavery," took one of the biggest labels on the planet to court, and lost. The judge ruled he'd had expert legal advice, renegotiated the deal multiple times, and been well compensated. He eventually negotiated his exit to DreamWorks and Virgin, but the momentum was gone. The Beverly Hills arrest in 1998 gave the tabloids what they'd been hunting for years. He came out on CNN the same week, said he wasn't ashamed, and released "Outside" as a top-three hit that mocked the whole thing.

The tabloids spent years hunting for George Michael's secret life, and they found the wrong one. After he died, the real secrets came out. He'd anonymously given ChildLine every royalty from "Jesus to a Child." He watched a stranger on Deal or No Deal talk about needing IVF money, called the show the next day, and paid for it without leaving his name. None of it was supposed to come out. He quietly funded Highgate's Christmas tree and local fair for a decade. He said in interviews he didn't know the exact total and didn't want to think about it. That was the point.

On Christmas morning 2016, his partner Fadi Fawaz found him in bed at his Goring-on-Thames home. The post-mortem came back inconclusive; the coroner's final ruling didn't come until March 2017. His documentary George Michael: Freedom was still being edited when he died; David Austin completed it for Channel 4 in October 2017. "Last Christmas" finally hit number one in January 2021, 36 years after Band Aid (which he appeared on) kept it off the top, and he never heard it happen.