It took the entire decade of the '80s to figure out that not everyone with a mouth and a beating heart should rap, and we endured a lot of painful fast talking to get to that conclusion. When Wham! members George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley wrote a rap about enjoying life while unemployed, they had no idea the hip-hop genre was never ever meant for them.
Was it the mom capris or the sensible flats that gave it away? We'll never know.
Context is key here. In 1982, rap was still an underground American thing -- Run-DMC was barely a band, and this exercise in hyper whiteness was released a month before Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message." So you could say Wham! helped push the rap movement into the mainstream. Or you could not say that and avoid ridicule. Judging two intensely Caucasian people for diving into a genre they were ill-suited for is like judging your senile grandfather for mistaking you for his Korean girlfriend. It made sense to him at the time. So Wham! actually called their rap "Wham Rap!" -- who among us hasn't named their dog "Dog," or their baby "Human"?
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