How Wham! Made Us Ecstatic

My Jamaican stepdad Maurice was a reason why the 1990s did not cause implode. So was a little tablet called MDMA. What's good enough for PTSD soldiers in the US army is good enough for me, says I.

1983. I'm painting in the art room at school. My paintings have DO NOT DISTURB scrawled on the back in deliberately insane looking script. 

1983. So George Michael returned from DJ Alfredo's Amnesnia in Ibiza and wrote this perfect ad for MDMA. 

Club Tropicana drinks are frEeeeeeeeeee....

First rule of advertising: you sell the user to the product. Never say "MDMA is great." Pump that shit through something familiar. 

Michael had an almost frightening genius for writing lyrics that were perfectly ordinary sentences: 

Club Tropicana, drinks are free, fun and sunshine, there's enough for everyone. All that's missing is the sea, but don't worry: you can suntan. 

All that's missing is the sea: this is an artificial paradise, not just an inland club, but something you swallow. Pack your bags...don't miss the flight: swallow the capsule. The birds and crickets on a loop at the start...the crescendo like coming up on E.

"Let me take you to the place ... where strangers take you by the hand," says MDMA, destroying two decades of Roger Waters-induced Meddle misery ("Strangers passing in the street...Do I take you by the hand...")

But don't worry, you'll feel like your birthright as a lifeform is being given the best massage. The birds and crickets on a loop at the start...

Let me take you to the place / Where membership's a smiling face / Brush shoulders with the stars. Yeah, those stars. 

The song has a perfect surface of "Rapper's Delight" fused with tropical Latinx-ness multiplied by the four to the floor of techno hidden beneatrh the Ibizan jollity. And ends with the mystic cool of Yoruba philosophy that every American has deliberately or accidentally downloaded. 

Freakin love this tune.