page_title: Freedom! '90
section_title: Music video
hierarchical_section_title: Freedom! '90 / Music video
caption_attribution_description: Director David Fincher at the french premiere of his movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Paris
context_page_description: "Freedom! '90" is a song written, produced, and performed by George Michael, and released on Columbia Records in 1990. The "'90" added to the end of the title is to prevent confusion with a hit by Michael's former band Wham!, also titled "Freedom". The song's backing beat is a sample from James Brown's song "Funky Drummer".
  It was the third single taken from Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, though released as the second single from the album in the United States and Australia. "Freedom! '90" was one of a few uptempo songs on this album. It was a major hit and peaked at No. 8 on the United States Billboard Hot 100. The song refers to Michael's past success with Wham!, yet also shows a new side of himself as a new man, who is more cynical about the music business than he had been before. Michael refused to appear in the video and allowed a group of supermodels to appear instead.
  Michael performed this song, alongside his 2012 single "White Light", during the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.
context_section_description: By 1990, Michael had grown weary of the pressures of fame, telling the Los Angeles Times, "At some point in your career, the situation between yourself and the camera reverses. For a certain number of years, you court it and you need it, but ultimately, it needs you more and it's a bit like a relationship. The minute that happens, it turns you off ... and it does feel like it is taking something from you." As a direct result, he advertently decided not to appear in photo shoots and music videos, saying, "I would like to never step in front of a camera again."
  Although he relented and decided to film a video for his new song, he still refused to appear in it. Instead, inspired by Peter Lindbergh's now-iconic portrait of Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington, and Cindy Crawford for the January 1990 cover of the British edition of Vogue, Michael asked the five models to appear in the video. While it was not uncommon at the time for models to appear in music videos, usually such models played the love interest of the singer, as with Christie Brinkley's appearance in her future husband Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl" video, or Turlington's appearance in Duran Duran's "Notorious" video. For "Freedom! '90", the five models would not portray Michael's on-screen girlfriends, but would lip sync the song in his place. The video also included model John Pearson and fashion photographer Mario Sorrenti.
  Evangelista took some persuading before agreeing to appear in the video, saying, "He thought it would make us into a big deal, that it would be good for us. I was like, 'Please, we're here. We've already arrived!'" After speaking with Michael, she was convinced, and rearranged her schedule. In a 2015 Vanity Fair article, Evangelista reflected on her decision positively, saying, "Little did I know that to this day, when someone meets me for the first time, they bring up that video. That's what they remember. So yeah, George was right." An initial disagreement over their salaries was resolved when Annie Veltri, who represented Crawford, Evangelista, Campbell, and Patitz at Elite Model Management, made it clear that all of her clients would receive the same compensation—$15,000 a day.
  The video was directed by David Fincher, having directed videos by Madonna, Billy Idol, Aerosmith, and Paula Abdul (who choreographed George Michael's Faith Tour).   His team for the multi-day "Freedom! '90" shoot included Camilla Nickerson, who went on to become a Vogue contributing editor, as the clothes stylist, hair stylist Guido and makeup artist Carol Brown. The video was shot in a vast building in the London Borough of Merton that Nickerson says exhibited "a grandeur and a Blade Runner feel". Video was shot by cinematographer Mike Southon.
  The 92-sketch storyboard called for each model to film on separate days, with the exception of Evangelista and Turlington, who appear in a scene together. Each model was assigned a verse to lip-synch, while for the song's chorus, Fincher envisioned the three iconic items from Michael's 1987 music video "Faith" that had come to symbolize his public image: his leather jacket, a Wurlitzer jukebox, and guitar, exploding in a ball of flame, except the leather jacket, at each occurrence of the word "freedom" during the chorus.  Before the chorus, the leather jacket was simply ignited and burned. Whereas "Faith" had opened with a jukebox phonograph needle touching a vinyl record, "Freedom! '90" opens with a compact disc player's laser beam reading a CD. In a 2004 interview with Adam Mattera for UK magazine Attitude, Michael reflected on the significance of the video's symbolism: "By the end of the Faith tour I was so miserable because I absolutely knew that I was gay... I didn't suddenly want to come out. I wanted to do it with some kind of dignity. So I thought 'okay, you have to start deconstructing this whole image.' "
  Nickerson envisioned a "low-key street style" for the wardrobe, which she characterizes as "a sort of undone beauty", in contrast to the prevailing "vampy, larger-than-life" dir
caption: The music video for "Freedom! '90" was directed by David Fincher.
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