Monkey

"Monkey" is Faith's hardest, most mechanical track — a clattering, industrial-edged funk record whose Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis remix (the version most people know) sharpens it into pure percussion and attitude. The rhythm is a dense grid of programmed drums, metallic hits, and a sawing synth bass that never lets up, with stabs of horn-like keys punching through. George Michael sings it clipped and aggressive, more bark than croon, dropping into breathy asides and then snapping back — a much colder vocal than the album's ballads, and deliberately so. The lyric is an ultimatum aimed at a lover whose addiction has become the third party in the relationship: why can't you do it, why can't you set your monkey free, the narrator refusing to keep competing with a habit he can't name outright. It's a rare late-eighties pop hit about codependency that neither moralizes nor romanticizes, and it hit number one in America on the strength of its groove rather than its subject. The sound sits somewhere between Minneapolis funk and the harder end of Janet Jackson's Control-era productions. It works best in motion — a gym, a late drive, anywhere the frustration in it has somewhere to go.