It is one of the strangest number one singles of the 1980s: a song that sounds like a party and reads like an intervention. When “Monkey” reached the top of the American charts in August 1988, it was bouncy, sweaty, and almost comically energetic, a dance track built for arenas and clubs, with George Michael grinning through a storm of funk guitar, stuttering vocals, and percussion. It was also, underneath all that noise, a song about watching someone you love lose to addiction, and about the moment you finally give up trying to save them. That contradiction is the whole story of “Monkey.” It is a sad song that learned to dance, a throwaway album track that got rebuilt into a chart-topper, and the record that turned an already historic album into a piece of chart history.
To understand how “Monkey” got to number one, you have to understand where George Michael stood in 1987. He was twenty-four years old and already one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, but he was desperate to be taken seriously. For five years he had been one half of Wham!, the duo he formed with his school friend Andrew Ridgeley, and although Wham! had conquered the world with hits like “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” and “Careless Whisper” — the latter effectively a Michael solo record in all but name — the group was dismissed by critics as a teenybopper act. Michael had grown tired of the accusation and tired of the duo itself. After Wham!’s farewell concerts at Wembley Stadium in the summer of 1986, billed as “The Final,” he set out to make a record that would prove, once and for all, that he was a serious artist: a singer, a songwriter, a producer, and a musician, all in one person. That record was Faith, released on October 30, 1987.
Faith was a declaration of independence in every sense. Michael wrote and produced every track on the album himself, with only one co-writing exception, and he played most of the instruments. The album ranged across pop, funk, R&B, soul, and rock, and it was sequenced like an argument: the title track’s rockabilly swagger, the quiet ache of “Father Figure,” the gospel-tinged balladry of “One More Try,” the controversy of “I Want Your Sex.” It worked beyond anyone’s expectations. Faith topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, stayed at number one on the Billboard 200 for twelve weeks, became the best-selling album of 1988, went on to sell around twenty-five million copies worldwide, and won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in early 1989. Its singles came one after another like waves: “Faith,” “Father Figure,” and “One More Try” all reached number one in America. By the summer of 1988, Michael was the biggest pop star in the world, and he was about to squeeze one more number one out of the same album.
“Monkey” was not supposed to be that record. On the album, it sits near the end of the track list, a funky, playful strutter built on a rippling, strobing funk guitar, with Michael chopping up his own voice until he becomes a stuttering echo of himself. Michael himself was not satisfied with it. He had rushed the song to completion, and in its original form it sounded like what it was: a catchy album track that could easily have become a half-forgotten deep cut. The lyrics, though, were anything but throwaway. “Monkey” is about dating someone with a serious drug problem, and Michael knew exactly what he was writing about. In a 2010 retrospective interview about the Faith album, he explained that the song was inspired by a friend who was struggling with drug and alcohol addiction, and that he had not known how to help her. He used the word “monkey” — as in the old expression “a monkey on your back” — to mean her addiction, and he put the question at the heart of the song in the plainest possible terms: “Do you love the monkey or do you love me?”
He had said the same thing, even more bluntly, at the time. In a 1987 interview given just after the album’s release, Michael explained that having “a monkey on your back” was American slang for having an addiction, and that the song was about the helplessness of watching a friend fall into it. “If I had to deal with a friend who was an addict I’d feel totally helpless,” he said. “I’ve watched that sort of situation and it’s very frustrating. That’s what the line ‘I hate your friends’ is about. When anyone gets in that position there’s always a group of friends encouraging it. You feel like you’re on the outside and there’s nothing you can do to drag them out of it.” That is the emotional core of the song, and it makes the chorus hit differently once you hear it. The narrator is not teasing a lover. He is issuing an ultimatum to a rival he cannot beat, and by the end of the song he has had enough: “I tried my best, but your head is such a mess, so I guess that I don’t want you anymore.” It is a breakup song, a farewell to someone who chose the drug over him.
The weird, wonderful tension of “Monkey” is that none of that sadness is audible on first listen. The music is all grin and sweat, a goofy, high-energy dance track that sounds like it is having the time of its life. That tonal clash — a song about addiction dressed up as a party — is part of why the record has endured. It is also why Michael, when Faith turned into the kind of commercial juggernaut that could justify yet another single, decided that the album version of “Monkey” was not good enough to send to radio. He wanted a version that could compete with the biggest club records of the moment, and he knew exactly who could build it.
The producers he called were Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the Minneapolis duo who had turned Janet Jackson into a superstar with Control and brought the Human League back to number one. Michael had admired their remix of Jackson’s “Nasty” in particular, and he wanted some of that same flavor: hard, percussive, maximalist, built for dance floors. What Jam and Lewis did to “Monkey” was not really a remix at all. They built an entirely new backing track from the ground up, in the new jack swing style that was then sweeping American R&B, and Michael re-recorded his vocals over it, while the duo mixed in sampled fragments of his original vocal. The result was a funky old-new hybrid: the song’s melody and words, but bigger, harder, and far more relentless than the album version. It was, in effect, a second recording of the same song, and it became the definitive version, the one American radio played.
The single was released on July 4, 1988, and its chart run was a coronation lap. “Monkey” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number forty-two on July 9, climbed steadily through the summer, and reached number one on August 27, 1988, where it stayed for two weeks. It was Michael’s sixth solo number one in the United States, and, crucially, the fourth number one single from Faith, after “Faith,” “Father Figure,” and “One More Try.” That made Michael only the third artist ever, at that point, to squeeze four number one hits out of a single album. The song also topped the Billboard Dance chart and reached the Top 10 on the R&B chart, while in Britain it peaked at number thirteen, a reminder that even at the height of his fame, Michael’s fortunes were always slightly different on either side of the Atlantic. In America, though, the summer of 1988 belonged to him completely: four number ones in less than five months from one album, a feat that put him in company so small it barely existed.
The video helped. Directed by Andy Morahan, Michael’s longtime collaborator, and choreographed by Paula Abdul, who was herself on the verge of pop stardom, the “Monkey” clip is mostly footage from the Faith World Tour, Michael sprinting across arena stages, grinding through intense choreography with his backing band, intercut with shots of him dancing alone in a white T-shirt and a big black hat against a plain white background. Some scenes are in grey scale; the tour footage is washed in tinted blue light. It is a video with no real story, and it does not need one. Its argument is simple: look at this performer, look at this show, look at what this tour feels like from the front row. In the age of MTV, that was argument enough, and the clip became one of the defining images of Michael’s imperial phase, the moment when a former teen idol became, visibly and undeniably, a commanding adult pop star.
There is a temptation to treat “Monkey” as a footnote to Faith, the fourth single, the one that came after the masterpieces. That would be a mistake. The song matters precisely because it is the least obviously important record on the album, and yet it still reached number one. It proved that Faith was not a collection of three great singles and filler, but a deep album with hits all the way down its track list. It also proved something about Michael himself: that his pop instincts were so sharp in 1988 that he could take a rushed, imperfect album track about a painful subject, hand it to two outside producers, and turn it into the biggest dance record of the summer without losing what made it his. The Jam and Lewis rebuild is often told as a story about two producers rescuing a song. It is better understood as a story about an artist secure enough to let someone else rebuild his work, and smart enough to know when his own version was not enough.
The song’s afterlife has been quieter than those of its siblings, but it has never gone away. It remains a staple of eighties dance nights and retrospectives, and it has become a favorite example, in chart histories, of how deep the Faith album ran. The 2011 remaster of Faith gathered its various versions together, including the Jam and Lewis remix and the a cappella-and-beats version, a reminder of how many lives this one song has lived: album track, club rebuild, radio smash, tour showpiece. And its subject has only grown more resonant. Songs about loving someone through addiction are common now; in 1988, hiding one inside the summer’s goofiest dance hit was a stranger and braver choice. Michael never preached about it. He just asked the question — the monkey or me — and let the groove carry the sadness underneath.
That is the final trick of “Monkey,” and the reason it still works. Play it at a party and it does what it was rebuilt to do: it fills the floor, it makes people move, it sounds like pure celebration. Listen to the words and a different record appears, one about helplessness, frustration, and the decision to walk away. Both records are real. Both are George Michael at his peak: the pop craftsman who could make anything sound like a hit, and the songwriter who could not help putting something true inside the hit. He asked whether his lover loved the monkey or loved him. The charts answered for the song. The song itself, thirty-five years later, is still asking.
Watch the official video for “Monkey” below.
Sources:
Stereogum — “The Number Ones: George Michael’s ‘Monkey'” (https://stereogum.com/2148368/the-number-ones-george-michaels-monkey/columns/the-number-ones)
Wikipedia — “Monkey (song)” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_(song))
Wikipedia — “Faith (George Michael album)” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_(George_Michael_album))
Mental Floss — “10 Facts About George Michael’s ‘Faith'” (https://www.mentalfloss.com/entertainment/music/george-michael-faith-music-facts)
Parade — “1988 Dance-Rock Song, Written by George Michael, Became a No. 1 Hit 38 Years Ago Today” (https://parade.com/entertainment/1988-dance-rock-song-written-george-michael-monkey-no-1-hit-38-years-ago-today)
George Michael Forever — “Faith: George Michael Speaks” (1987 No. 1 magazine interview) (https://gmforever.com/faith-george-michael-speaks/)