| "I Want Your Sex" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Single byGeorge Michael | ||||
| from the albumFaithandBeverly Hills Cop II (The Motion Picture Soundtrack Album) | ||||
| B-side | "I Want Your Sex" ("Rhythm Two: Brass in Love") | |||
| Released | ||||
| Recorded |
| |||
| Studio | ||||
| Genre | ||||
| Length |
| |||
| Label | Columbia | |||
| Songwriter(s) | George Michael | |||
| Producer(s) | George Michael | |||
| George Michael singles chronology | ||||
| ||||
| Music video | ||||
| "I Want Your Sex" onYouTube | ||||
"I Want Your Sex" is a song by English singer and songwriterGeorge Michael. Released as a single on 18 May 1987 (US)[1] and 1 June 1987 (UK),[1] it was the third hit from thesoundtrack toBeverly Hills Cop II and the first single from Michael's debut solo albumFaith.
The single was certifiedplatinum by theRIAA for shipments in excess of one million copies in the United States. It was also the recipient forGolden Raspberry Award for Worst Original Song. The song's radio airplay on theBBC was restricted to post-watershed hours due to concerns that it might promote promiscuity and could be counterproductive to contemporary campaigns aboutAIDS awareness.[5]
The song has three separate parts dubbed "Rhythms". The first one, titled "Rhythm One: Lust", is the version released as a single and banned by the BBC. It appears by itself on theBeverly Hills Cop II soundtrack, and mixed with the second version, titled "Rhythm Two: Brass in Love", onFaith. The second Rhythm also appears by itself as theB-side of the single. A third part, "Rhythm Three: A Last Request", appears as a B-side to the "Hard Day" 7" and "Kissing a Fool" 12" singles, and on the CD version ofFaith as a bonus track. All three versions were mixed together into one 13-minute song, dubbed the "Monogamy Mix", for the 12" and CD single releases.
Part 1 of "I Want Your Sex" was recorded in August 1986 atSarm West Studio 2, London, roughly 2 months after theWham! split that June. It was written entirely in the studio, with Michael playing all the instruments: aLinnDrum, aRoland Juno-106 and aYamaha DX7.[3] Michael explained why he wrote the track this way inInternational Musician and Recording World magazine:
I didn't want to write a song as such. I wanted to make a record. When it comes to makingdance records I'm much more able to do them as I go along in the studio, because it's much more about sound and rhythm. I deliberately wanted to make a record where if you stripped it down to what was left of the song, there wasn't much of a song there.[6]
Michael admitted that the track was "really easy to do", but it was difficult in the sense that he intended it to be a dance record, so he "had to do something new with it every 16 bars" for the song's arrangement to "hold up interest-wise".[6]
The "squelching" bass sound heard in the song's introduction was caused entirely by accident, as engineer Chris Porter described:
We were working on a song, again we just had a Juno, LinnDrum and DX7, and we connected them all up so that we could run them offMIDI. After doing some programming, we returned to the studio the next afternoon, I pressed "play" on the tape machine, the MIDI obviously wasn't right and everything started making these weird noises. The drums were triggering random sounds on the Juno and DX7, starting to make what you now hear as the intro on "I Want Your Sex": a strange squelching, pulsing bass sound.
I went, "Oh, damn, I'll reset it," and George said, "Hang on a second, hang on a second! That sounds really good, doesn't it?" I said, "It's a bit weird," and he said, "Yeah, but if we just take a bit out here and a bit out of there we might be able to use it..." We recorded a few bars of that odd squelching noise, and then it morphs into the song, at which point the bass become the bass part and just the Juno, LinnDrum and DX7 provide the overall landscape.[3]
Michael himself had a similar recollection:
So what happened was, we were writing a much fasterPop song that I did have in my head, called "Johnny Sex". We needed to trigger a sound off theJuno 106, and in order to do it we had to take the drum pattern down to half speed. It didn't quite work, but it accidentally set the Juno off to a random pattern, which became the pumping noise at the bottom of "I Want Your Sex". I thought it sounded really good, really tribal, and it gave me a totally different idea which I worked around, I just played the other stuff and had it sequenced.[6]
Parts 2 and 3 were recorded the following year during sessions at Puk Studios inGjerlev, Denmark, as extensions to part 1 (which had been selected for the first single), with part 2 being the one with a "more New York club sound" (having been recorded with a seven-piece brass section), while part 3 was the "romantic" and "altogether smoother" counterpart. For the crossover points, the 56-channel SSL console (with 28 channels on either side) at the Puk facility would be used to bounce from the original multitrack on one side of the SSL onto the new multitrack slave on the other, and George would rehearse the musicians on a particular part before dropping them in on the new track.[3]
Themusic video, directed byAndy Morahan,[7] featured Michael and his then-girlfriend Kathy Jeung to emphasize that he was in a monogamous relationship; at one point, he is shown using lipstick to write the words"explore" and"monogamy" on her back, which is photographed and retouched at the end of the video to reveal the phrase "explore monogamy". Spanish model Gloria Rodríguez Veiga was also used for naked scenes in a way that allowed the audience to assume they were the same woman; these shots are interspersed with intentionally blurred footage of George Michael dancing and singing the song.[8]
In a 2004 interview withAdam Mattera for UK magazineAttitude, Michael reflected: "It was totally real. Kathy was in love with me but she knew that I was in love with a guy at that point in time. I was still saying I was bisexual... She was the only female that I ever brought into my professional life. I put her in a video. Of course she looked like a beard. It was all such a mess, really. My own confusion and then on top of that what I was prepared to let the public think."[9]
The video generated controversy over its sexual themes. In 2002,MTV2's countdown ofMTV's Most Controversial Videos Ever to Air on MTV included the video for "I Want Your Sex" at number 3. The original video cut appears on theTwenty Five compilation 2-DVD set.
In the US, the song was first featured on theBeverly Hills Cop II soundtrack album, which was released to radio stations in early May 1987. The commercial release of the soundtrack followed on 18 May. An immediate surge in airplay of "I Want Your Sex" as an album cut prompted CBS to release the single the same day.[1] The UK single debuted the first week of June.[2]
"I Want Your Sex" was the second single Michael released in 1987, following "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)", his duet withAretha Franklin. On the song's daytime radio ban, Michael commented during an interview withJonathan Ross:
I wasn't expecting the blanket ban. I think it's unfair because it's the first ban of its kind in a long time and I think that if I were not George Michael then I would have no problem being played on those stations. And it's incredibly irritating having a record out for a couple of weeks and knowing that people haven't heard it.[10]
Despite censorship and airplay issues, an edited version of the song's music video received ample airplay on North American music channels, fueling its popularity there. The single eventually reached #2 on both the USBillboard Hot 100 chart and the USCash Box Top 100.[11][12] It also hit #2 in Canada, where it ended up becoming the 13th most popular single of the year.[13]
The song reached #3 in theUK Singles Chart, where the song's reprise maintained an audience for many years thanks toBBC Radio 1 breakfast show hostSimon Mayo using a looped version as backing music for his daily featureOn This Day in History. It also sold 327,160 copies there.[14]
Although it was one of Michael's biggest hits, the singer ignored the song following its release; he never performed it afterthe Faith Tour and although the Rhythm Two version appears onLadies & Gentlemen: The Best of George Michael, it does not appear on the 2006 retrospectiveTwenty Five; furthermore, the "Monogamy" mix does not appear on the 2011 remastered release ofFaith. In an interview withMark Goodier, included in the large-format book released with the 2011 remaster, Michael said that he still likes the second "Rhythm" but not the first, and that he distanced himself from the song because its production sounded too much likePrince; indeed, "Rhythm 1", as well as a few other tracks on theFaith album (such as "Hard Day"), features Michael simulating female vocals by artificiallypitching up and altering his own voice, much the same way as Prince was doing at the time with his pseudo-female alter egoCamille. In the interview, Michael admits that he was "deeply enamoured" with Prince, and adds that he thought it was very bad for him to be infatuated with a colleague of his.[15]Rolling Stone editorDavid Fricke described this song as "a new bump-and-grind original that sounds more like Prince's stark, sexy 'Kiss' than anything in the Wham! catalog".[16] In 2016, after Michael's death, Andrew Unterberger ofBillboard ranked the song number eight on his list of Michael's 15 greatest songs.[17]
7"
12" / CD / cassette
CD – 654 601-3 (UK) [1989]
Weekly charts[edit]
| Year-end charts[edit]
|
| Region | Certification | Certified units/sales |
|---|---|---|
| Canada (Music Canada)[57] | Gold | 50,000^ |
| Netherlands (NVPI)[58] | Gold | 75,000^ |
| United Kingdom | — | 327,160[59] |
| United States (RIAA)[60] | Platinum | 1,000,000^ |
^ Shipments figures based on certification alone. | ||
['I Want Your Sex' is] a frisky, silly pop-funk track with a pronounced Prince influence...
| Films |
|
|---|---|
| Characters | |
| Music | |
| Video games | |
