Older and duller

It was easy to hear Faith as the work of a white boy who desperately wanted to be Prince -- as an ingenious processing of Prince into what Nirvana called radio-friendly unit shifter (though Michael was more than some funkified Pat Boone). But where the impudence of Prince singles like "I Want To Be Your Lover" and "Little Red Corvette" was credited as a reaction against the conservatism of the Reagan era, Michael's "I Want Your Sex," its appearance coinciding with the first widespread public concern over AIDS, was condemned as irresponsible by liberals who didn't see how they were playing into the sexual mores Republicans had been pushing all along. "I Want Your Sex" was a calculated commercial move that also managed to be an affront to a stifling political climate. And like just about every single from Faith that followed it, such as the wonderfully overwrought ballad "One More Try" and the title rockabilly knockoff, it managed to hold up over the course of its domination of the charts.

On Older, Michael has tamed his own little red love machine, and the lubricious river that threatened to become an ocean on "Faith" has slowed to an almost demure trickle. Even the track with the most braggadocio, the current single "Fastlove," where Michael proclaims that he'll give up being Mr. Right if he can be Mr. Right Now, never goes beyond a mildly aggressive volume and tempo. It's as though he wanted to show us that the years spent in a lawsuit trying to get out of his Sony contract have turned him into a genuine artist, and that an artist has no time for trashy pop pleasures.

Older carries a dedication to the legendary Brazilian bossa nova composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, who, Michael says in the liner notes, "changed the way I listened to music." The determinedly Latin feel of the album is pleasant enough. If you happened to be spending a summer afternoon on the beach and heard any of these songs wafting out of a radio, you'd want to follow the sound, get close to it to hear the parts the surf and wind were swallowing up. Listen to it on the headphones, though, and it'll still sound as if it were wafting in from far away. That helps when the lyrics run along the lines of "Oh the lover I still miss was Jesus to a child." But it doesn't keep the songs from fading into the background. There seems to be no bottom to the numbers. And though the sound evaporates while you're listening, it also comes off as something that's been achieved.

Michael produced and arranged the album, wrote all the songs, and played a slew of the instruments. Older can't match the summer-breeze lightness of, say, Stan Getz's work with João Gilberto. You're always aware of how much effort has gone into giving Older its lighter-than-helium sound. And you're always aware that Michael the singer is holding himself back. Much of the pleasure of a number like Faith's "Father Figure" comes from his unsubtle emoting. The high, whispery passages are a prelude to his letting go on the choruses. When Sinatra made his wonderful (and largely forgotten) 1967 album with Jobim, he did perhaps the softest singing of the latter part of his career. That softness, though, gave the songs an emotional weight. Sinatra sang like a man trying to let his troubles and heartbreak float away from him; Michael just floats away. The exception is "Star People," a nasty swipe at the propensity of the fabulously famous to complain about the toughness of their lot (ironically, the sort of complaining that led Sinatra to chastise Michael in a letter to the Los Angeles Times a few years back).

There is a star fantasy going on here, though, and it's the fantasy of wanting to be taken seriously as an artist -- unfortunately its side effect is the neutering of all your talents. Michael dealt with his passion to be taken seriously on Listen Without Prejudice's "Freedom 90," where he slammed the manufactured, stubble-faced mannequin image that has dogged him since Wham! The oomph and swing of that number seemed like a good harbinger. And the video, where the lyrics were lip-synched by a succession of supermodels, seemed to be Michael's realization that glamor wasn't all bad.

But on Older, Michael has landed himself into the MOR hell that's transformed a gaudy pop queen like Elton John into a merely respectable figure, and where Sting's secondhand jazz-isms make him something like an éminence grise. On "Freedom 90," Michael, referring to himself, sang, "When you shake your ass/They notice fast/Some mistakes were meant to last." The booty-shaking he appears to have abandoned is exactly the type of mistake the stiflingly correct Older could use.