Wham! "Music From The Edge of Heaven"– Classic or Dud?

So: there are a lot of good tracks on the album, but the album also feels like a collection of tracks (which it was) rather than something coherent.

always feel like Wham!'s growth & development is underpraised - this album was such a great swansong, not "surprising" exactly but deeply satisfying in that it confirmed that they really were as smart and versatile as they seemed. that beautiful Peter Saville cover, the vast ice-cave wilderness of "A Different Corner," the title track one of my favorite singles of the decade. also, haven't retested this theory recently, but iirc scott otm upthread that Wham is incredible music to listen to stoned. plus it's kind of moving that Michael wanted to re-do "Wham Rap" and throw out the yucky parts.

feel like I saw this pitched for 33 & 1/3, really wish that would happen. they had become a great act by this point (I don't know if any of the musicians carried over from album to album) and it's the rare case of a band leaving on a high note.

isn't it George programming/playing everything?

well, Ridgeley played guitar, I guess.

George arranged everything, but there are a lot of musicians on that album, including one Elton John.

isn't it George programming/playing everything?

no - I scored a cassette of this yesterday; Michael takes a "producer" credit, which annoys me (this is a personal shibboleth of mine, I don't think you should take a producer credit unless you know how to man the boards without an assistant), but the engineer is Chris Porter, who also engineered Faith and Listen Without Prejudice (and a ton of other stuff, including Robbie Nevil and Jody Watley). The credits are long. I think Michael really is the genius he thinks he is but I also can't remember ever seeing him play an instrument, so I suspect he's more the guy standing behind the engineer saying "no, no, the horns go 'bah bahhh bah, not bah bah-bahhh, do I have to do everything myself" -- which there's nothing wrong with though I think the dudes who do that (they're numerous) habitually undercredit the people who make their visions real

Yeah, that sounds right. A few years back, I saw a brief interview with the director of the Faith video, in which he mentioned that George doesn't really play anything. (This was in the context of him explaining that he'd had to show a couple of chord shapes to George in order to lend his "guitar performance" some verisimilitude.) I guess George is like Michael Jackson, a hugely talented musician who happens not to have any particular facility with an instrument. Like Jackson, I assume he relies on ace session men to translate his ideas into reality.

He gets instrumental credits on Faith (programming and keyboards)

Musicians tend to underrate their instrumental prowess. Bowie likes to say he doesn't "play anything," which is absurd. Maybe he doesn't play well but so what.

*sometimes tend to

yeah Bowie played plenty of guitar (and saxophone!) on his earlier stuff. Vast is right, you don't have to have any technical facility to be a brilliant musician at least as far as I'm concerned -- but I do think you need technical facility to actually be a producer, and that "producer" credits to guys who just thumbs-up-or-down the work of the engineers are about 1) money and 2) ego

yeah yeah yeah
uh uhhh uh uh
YEAH YEAH YEAH

^ OTM. Was just about to post exactly that when I saw the thread had been bumped!

LA DA DA DA DI DA

been in my head since the news

such an incredibly impressive album

Wasn't this LP a US-only thing?

GM's stuff was not in my wheelhouse, but yes this is about as good as mindless piffle gets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCqEyJc-wdk