Kissing to Be Clever (1982)

Boy George turns 50 next month, a statement of fact I am not entirely prepared to get my head around. To me, the "boy" part of George O'Dowd's self-selected appellation is still and will likely always be the most relevant descriptor. The arc of his career and his life starts here, when he was barely 21. Culture Club stepped in, with Spandau Ballet, Visage, and Duran Duran, as one of the main players in the so-called New Romantic flavor of British New Wave in the early '80s. Perhaps more than any of them, Boy George and Culture Club drew convincingly on reggae and soul sources, with everything polished up to a high sheen of production, even as provocative titles such as "I'll Tumble 4 Ya," "White Boys Can't Control It," and "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" promise a sultry cornucopia of vaguely sadomasochistic sexual pleasures aplenty. Boy George has got a pretty good voice, and he figured out how to mimic enough of Smokey Robinson's sweet croon to transcend all the things that potentially seemed likely to be shallow and trendy about him and his projects, starting with the willful outré manner and, especially, the coy transvestism. Right out of the gate Culture Club started scoring hits and for my money the first of them, "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," remains the best, a bruised and whimpering declaration of love in the face of unnamed threat and/or potential rejection that positively soars on the chorus. In many ways Boy George has gone on to live out the lifestyle he romanticized, even as he has found ingenious ways to make it work for his advantage—who else, for example, could possibly have been tapped for the theme to the movie The Crying Game? It proved to be his biggest hit since the salad days of Culture Club, and there he was again, charming as ever, on the TV talk show circuit. More often, however, he appears to have lived out the dark side, with frequently lurid episodes encompassing heroin addiction, secret love affairs with straight men, and imprisonment on charges related to drug use, theft, and even kidnapping. Nevertheless, in interviews he remains as charming and self-effacing a celebrity as one could hope for. A man of mystery, in other words—and with the potential still, I suspect, to surprise us all at least one more time.