"Kissing A Fool": George Unleashes His Inner Rat Pack

From Track One, Side One all the way up through "Monkey," one could not have exactly accused Faith of being an album lacking in top-tier material. Four #1 singles, a #2 single, some solid album cuts ("Hand to Mouth," "Hard Day") ... hell, I wouldn't have blamed Georgios if he'd just shaved that stubble, hung up the ol' leather jacket, and called it a day.

But no.

The man wasn't satisfied. He still needed to throw one more killer song onto his album - a song performed in the kind of style that no one in their right mind would have ever thought he would have been capable of mastering. Not just a ballad. Not just an adult contemporary ballad.

A standard.

Strap on that cummerbund, slip that valet a $100 bill, and check your coat at the door, because with "Kissing a Fool," you and George are about to spend an elegant evening uptown. Say hello to Georgios Connick, Jr.

As if Faith hadn't already been enough of a mega-blockbuster, career-redefining album, he slips in a little "Kissing a Fool" at the end and makes it even mega-er, even more re-defining-ing. "Kissing a Fool" was George's way of saying, "I can even do this, y'all." Here's my main thought: most of the material on Faith, while excellent, certainly sounds ... of its time. Let's face it: it's an album smothered in synth sauce. Most of it has managed, in my opinion, to also transcend its time, due to the passion and playfulness in his singing, the inherent melodic sturdiness of his songwriting, and the craft in the production.

But "Kissing a Fool" is another beast entirely. It's the Dorian Gray of George Michael songs. It still sparkles like the top of the Chrysler Building on a breezy autumn morning. Granted, it doesn't sound like a recording from the '50s, which I imagine was the primary vibe George was aiming for. But it sure doesn't sound like a recording from the '80s either. This could have been recorded for a Tony Bennett comeback album circa 1993, I'm thinking. It could have been recorded for one of those Rod Stewart Great American Songbook albums from the '00s. It could have been recorded bloody yesterday. In other words, he didn't just write a standard. He made it sound like a standard. For instance, when the horns come in toward the end, they don't sound like, say, "I Want Your Sex, Part II: Brass In Love" horns. They sound like snappy, full-bodied, swingin' supper club horns. The piano rings and shimmers around the stereo spectrum like the refracted light emanating from the candles presumably resting on top of it. And those vocals! The vibe on this track is so smoky, I feel like I'm getting cancer just listening to it.



"Kissing a Fool" was Faith's coup de grace. As the last jazzy notes of an electric guitar bring the track to close, one can almost feel the final remnants of Wham! firmly and irrevocably dissipating into the night air like the helpless victim of an Evanesco spell. How the single got to #5 in the U.S. I'm not entirely sure; who hadn't already bought the whole album at that point? Maybe they really needed the instrumental version on the B-side? And until our friends at Vevo get around to acquiring the rights to the video, I'll have to embed this version that features subtitles in Spanish. My favorite lyric in "Kissing a Fool" - excuse me, "Besando a un Loco" - has always been "La gente nunca puedes cambiar como piensan." Don't tell me I'm the only one. Also, notice how George uses his guitar as a literal prop. He doesn't even bother to pretend-strum until the end of the bridge. Anyone "fooled" by that faux-playing only deserves to be "kissed" by death. From Professor Higglediggle:

Michael iterates the codification of Shakespeare on the concluding track to Faith, twisting the accumulated symbolic capital of the Bard's oeuvre into the seemingly anodyne lounge jazz ballad "Kissing a Fool," a maladroit melange of interpretations of various "Fool" characters found in Shakespeare's canonical works. The opening couplet, "You are far/When I could have been your star" (re)positions Feste's promise in Twelfth Night, "What is love? 'Tis not hereafter/Present mirth hath present laughter" as an astrological farce, while the following lines, "You listened to people/Who scared you to death/And from my heart" re-contextualize the mocking plea of Falstaff, "Master Gower, if they become me not, he was a fool that/taught them me. This is the right fencing grace, my lord; tap for/tap, and so part fair" in Act II, Scene I of Henry IV, Part II. However, Michael appears to misunderstand, if nobly, the Fool's wry observation "The man that makes his toe/What he his heart should make/Shall of a corn cry woe/And turn his sleep to wake" in King Lear when he croons, "Strange that I was wrong enough/To think you'd love me too," although this might arguably be intended as a nod to Costard in Love's Labours Lost, rendering it less malapropos. Avoiding a  reference to the Fool's smooch-laden banter in Twelfth Night ("What's to come is still unsure/In delay there lies no plenty/Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty/Youth's a stuff will not endure") may have either been a noble gesture of restraint on the singer's part, or an exclusion properly foolish.