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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Like a number of pop artists who have attained lasting notoriety, the British singer and spectacle Boy George has a canny understanding of the needs, hopes, and dreams of his audience. In Culture Club, the rock group that made him a household name back in the early eighties, he married the sound of black nostalgia--Motown, ska, and a little reggae--to a distinctly white representation of visual difference. His look--a kind of errant Hasidism mixed with a feminized Rastafarianism--was an advertisement not only for his strikingly amphibious self but also for world music, which was just coming into vogue. In fact, what he was putting over was the entire history of English eccentricity, with its arch knowingness, its veiled sexual references, and its "naughty" borrowings from the former colonies.
Culture Club disbanded in 1986. Boy George went on to drug addiction, rehab, spiritualism, memoir-writing, record-producing, and d.j.'ing before conceiving and writing the songs for the musical "Taboo" (at the Plymouth). In it, one can hear how his songwriting talent has deepened, and one can see that his feel for the business of show hasn't faltered. It's astonishing, really, that the young man who made the world bop to "Karma Chameleon," in 1983, could have written the haunting aria "Talk Amongst Yourselves" or the structurally complex quintet "Out of Fashion," but there they are--songs that break...
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