"One More Try"? More Like "Let's Film This Video In Only One Try"

Minimalism. It worked for Hemingway. It worked for Beckett. It worked for every cross-legged Japanese monk who ever jotted down a haiku in a bucolic spring garden. But what their brands of minimalism were clearly lacking ... was stubble.

"One More Try" is '80s pop music stripped to its barren, brutal core. There is nowhere to hide, no relief from the endless onslaught of Michaelian passion. All must bow to the unadorned intensity of the piece. "One More Try" is like George Michael's version of "In the Air Tonight" ... but sexier. It's George, an organ, a drum machine, and God, alone in a room, face to face, battling it out for the sanctity of one man's soul. And the drum machine is arguably winning.

Imagine the conversation at the record company when George handed this one in. "Nice George, it's really lovely, killer demo, so ... what's the final version going to sound like?"

"This is the final version."

Jaw, meet floor.

And it's nearly six minutes long! He practically dares the listener to lose patience. But I'm with you Georgie Boy, I'm with you to the bitter end. Frankly, when I was a kid, I probably did find this song a bit boring, but when I was a kid I also ate uncooked Top Ramen noodles with the MSG-laden flavor mix sprinkled in between the crevices, so what the fuck did I know? I'll tell you what I didn't know: I didn't know what true heartbreak was. Actually, even now I'm not sure I know what true heartbreak is. But what I know is that George knows.

I also know this: "One More Try" couldn't have skated by on such a sparse arrangement if it hadn't been, at its core, a fundamentally well-structured composition. Sure, production-wise, it sounds like a hit from 1988, but compositionally, this sucker could have been a hit in 1968. Think of what Otis Redding or Etta James might have done with it on a muggy summer night at Muscle Shoals. Do I even detect a little Pachelbel's "Canon In D" in the chord progression? Screw 1968; it could've even been a hit in 1688. Like the never-ending "Canon," "One More Try" circles and circles and circles without ever seeming capable of resolving its underlying tension, as a wary, bruised George pleads desperately with a potential new lover that he just isn't ready to love again, damn it, oh, fine, what the hell. Indeed, when the backing slows to an agonizing crawl in those last few seconds and George finally finds it within himself to open his wounded heart to humanity once more, it's like one of those moments at the end of a Bresson film; as with Michel in his jail cell at the end of Pickpocket, or the donkey in the field at the end of Au Hasard Balthazar, one senses all discord finally turning to harmony, and the work reaches an unexpected but entirely logical state of grace (sheesh, I'm starting to sound like Professor Higglediggle here). Note, also, that the very last lines are the only time George even sings the title of the song. He could have called it "Ain't No Joy For An Uptown Boy," but that wouldn't have quite captured the mood of the piece, I suppose.

Of course, Pachelbel and Bresson don't exactly ooze sultry R&B vibes. I can sit here and tell you how soulful "One More Try" is, but don't take my word for it: in addition to hitting #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, it also, somehow, some way, topped the Billboard R&B chart. And George Michael was many things, but one of those many things was not black. Look out, Hall & Oates.



I guess George was feeling cocky at this point, because when it came time to shoot the video, he decided to make it even more minimalist than the song itself. As the camera fades up, we find George sitting pensively in a dusty room, obscured in shadow, with a ghostly light pouring in through two stained glass windows behind him. And then the camera holds that shot. And holds it. And holds it.

And it's mesmerizing.

You can't turn away! There's not a single cut, and yet one feels an entire narrative of longing, doubt, regret, and hesitation unfolding before one's eyes. The viewer doesn't even get treated to a close-up of his singing, bearded visage until the 2:47 mark. Now that's balls. It probably took them about twenty minutes to film the video, and about ten minutes to edit it. I'll bet half the budget simply went to George's makeup. And why is there so much dust in the room? Did they think about vacuuming? Or maybe they could have just opened up one of those stained glass windows, you know, let a little air in. Wait. Maybe that grey haze is supposed to be George's aura. And why are the love seat and the floor covered with sheets? Is George squatting in someone else's posh London apartment? No, I've got it: they were trying to protect the upholstery from his continually dripping sexiness. Professor Higglediggle's analysis:

The boldly static image that opens the piece attempts to confront the psychologically dormant and/or sociologically neutered viewer with a (re)contextualized (re)creation of that very dormancy and impotence, partially echoing Warhol's antagonistic, neo-subversive Empire and Sleep, only lacking those works' intangible post-Brakhage elan. The artist's failure/refusal to properly decorate, light, or heat ("I'm so cold inside") his dwelling suggests his nominal inability to live within the capitalist framework of Thatcherite England, although the income generated by his music ironically further propagated the system he sought to oppose. Furthermore, Michael's toothless plea, "Cause teacher, there are things/That I don't want to learn" may be read as ineffective anti-authoritarian posturing, what Barthes referred to as Doxa, as opposed to the preferred Para-Doxa. However, his pseudo-rejection of this educational figure may be refer, in a Lacanian sense, to buried childhood trauma, given that the "last teacher [he] had made [him] cry."