Songfacts®:

• In "Freedom '90," George Michael was trying to free himself from the shackles of Sony, his record label at the time. They created a heartthrob image for him to promote Faith, his 1987 debut solo album, and Michael was now trying to distance himself from it, using both the lyrics and video to made his point. In the video, all the Faith imagery explodes: the jacket, the jukebox, the guitar.
  
  The song is part of his second solo album, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, released in 1990.
• When the video appeared, viewers were quite shocked because George Michael wasn't in it. (He's not in the video for "Praying For Time," also from the album, either). This was part of his effort to distance himself from his image and bring the focus to his music, and he did it in a very clever way for this video: He got a bunch of supermodels to lip sync for him.
  
  Appearing in the video are Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Tatjana Patitz. These five had recently appeared together on the cover of the UK edition of Vogue magazine, which gave Michael the idea.
  
  The video was directed by David Fincher, who was a top music video director before moving on to feature films like Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network. The "Freedom '90" clip was shot in London over a weekend.
• When you shake your ass, they notice fast
  some mistakes were build to last
  
  George Michael's tush was much discussed during his "Faith" era, thanks to its starring role in the video for the title track. It was even parodied on Saturday Night Live in a bit where Michael (played by Dana Carvey) wants to create an entire marketing campaign around his ass. When he won MTV's Video Vanguard award in 1989, the real George Michael quipped, "I'd like to thank Saturday Night Live for giving my rear end the celebrity it deserves."
  
  In the "Freedom '90" video, we see a guy scratching butt when this line comes on. The butt-scratcher is Mario Sorrenti, who became an acclaimed photographer.
• "Freedom '90" is an autobiographical song that chronicles George Michael's early years in the pop duo Wham! with his good friend Andrew Ridgely:
  
  Heaven knows we sure had some fun boy
  What a kick just a buddy and me
  We had every big-shot good-time band on the run boy
  We were living in a fantasy
  
  Wham! were a very big deal in their native UK, where they had big hits with heavily punctuated songs like "Young Guns (Go For It!)" and "Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do?)." Michael's star power was evident early on, and he grew out of Wham! pretty quickly, making that transition with the 1984 song "Careless Whisper." He always spoke fondly of his time in Wham!, and he remained good friends with Ridgely.
• In 1996 Robbie Williams released a cover of "Freedom '90" as his first single after leaving the boy-band Take That. His version tanked, but Williams recovered and went on to a successful solo career with his 1997 album Life Thru a Lens.
• Alicia Keys performed this as part of her set during the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards. While she was performing this, Kid Rock and Tommy Lee got in a fight that was likely fueled by the presence of Pamela Anderson, who was part of the show. The incident did not appear in the broadcast, but a camera caught the end of the melee and MTV made this video available online.
• The song was originally just called "Freedom," but was changed to "Freedom '90" (representing the year it was released - 1990) so it wouldn't be confused with the 1984 Wham! hit "Freedom."
• For Entertainment Weekly's 2017 George Michael tribute issue, Cindy Crawford spoke about her experience filming the music video for this song. "I heard from director David Fincher that George wanted the group of women who had done a 1990 cover of British Vogue together exactly, no substitutions," she said. "It seemed like it was George's idea to do this video, where it wasn't about him even though the song was obviously about him. Everyone shot [scenes] separately so it wasn't like a big party atmosphere. We each had our own personalities within the video. But I remember being bummed, like, 'Really? I have to be in the bathtub with a towel on my head? Everyone else gets to look so cool!' Then when I saw it after I was like, 'okay this is pretty cool.'
  
  For so many of us, [George's songs were] the soundtrack of our young coming of age. But more than the music, it was the message that was just as important. MTV had really changed the face of music. It wasn't enough to have a great voice anymore. You had to be the whole package. George Michael deciding at that pivotal moment that he didn't want to play the game in the same way, that he wanted to make it his own game, was a great message. I think people loved him more because of that."
• This song plays in the 2016 movie Keanu in a shootout scene where Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key save a kitten and kill some bad guys. It's also used in a scene where Key takes gruff from his homies when he plays the song. "This s--t sounds kind of white," one of them tells him. Key retorts: "This is George Michael, one of the greatest recording artists of all time. This dude real O.G. up in here."
  
  He then explains that Michael wasn't black, but still gangsta:
  
  "He used to roll with this ni--a Ridgeley, then George Michael's trying to do that solo thing, and then Wham!... nobody ever see Ridgeley ever again."
  
  The film was released about eight months before Michael's death.
  
  The song also appears in these films:
  
  Last Christmas (2019)
  Pitch Perfect 3 (2017)
  The Nanny Diaries (2007)
  I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (2007)
• The "freedom" refrain in this song makes it perfect for commercials, and it has been used in a few. The first that we know of is a 2009 spot for Dolce & Gabbana to launch their fragrance, Anthology. Like the song's video, the commercial stars Naomi Campbell and Claudia Schiffer. In 2012, it was used in spots for Chase (the "Freedom" card) and in 2019 it showed up in spots for T-Mobile.
• A new generation was introduced to "Freedom '90" in 2024 when it was used in the first episode of Dexter: Original Sin, which takes place in 1991 and follows the budding serial killer Dexter Morgan in Miami. The song plays while he's walking through a University Of Miami job fair with the narration: "All those shiny, happy people so excited to plan their lives, and all I wanted to do was end one."