I Want Your Sex

"I Want Your Sex" is a song by English singer and songwriter George Michael. Released as a single on 18 May 1987 (US) and 1 June 1987 (UK), it was the third hit from the soundtrack to Beverly Hills Cop II and the first single from Michael's debut solo album Faith. It peaked at number two in the US and number three in the UK, and was a top five single in many other countries.

The single was certified platinum by the RIAA for sales in excess of two million in the United States. It was also the recipient for Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Original Song. The song's radio airplay on the BBC was restricted to post-watershed hours due to concerns that it might promote promiscuity and could be counterproductive to contemporary campaigns about AIDS awareness.

Composition
The song has three separate parts dubbed "Rhythms". The first one, titled "Rhythm One: Lust", is the version released as a single and banned by the BBC. It appears by itself on the Beverly Hills Cop II soundtrack, and mixed with the second version, titled "Rhythm Two: Brass in Love", on Faith. The second Rhythm also appears by itself as the B-side of the single. A third part, "Rhythm Three: A Last Request", appears as a B-side to the "Hard Day" 7" and "Kissing a Fool" 12" singles, and on the CD version of Faith as a bonus track. All three versions were mixed together into one 13-minute song, dubbed the "Monogamy Mix", for the 12" and CD single releases.

Writing and production
Part 1 of "I Want Your Sex" was recorded in August 1986 at Sarm West Studio 2, London, roughly 2 months after the Wham! split that June. It was written entirely in the studio, with Michael playing all the instruments: a LinnDrum, a Roland Juno-106 and a Yamaha DX7. Michael explained why he wrote the track this way in International Musician and Recording World magazine: "I didn't want to write a song as such. I wanted to make a record. When it comes to making dance records I'm much more able to do them as I go along in the studio, because it's much more about sound and rhythm. I deliberately wanted to make a record where if you stripped it down to what was left of the song, there wasn't much of a song there."

Michael admitted that the track was "really easy to do", but it was difficult in the sense that he intended it to be a dance record, so he "had to do something new with it every 16 bars" for the song's arrangement to "hold up interest-wise".

The "squelching" bass sound heard in the song's introduction was caused entirely by accident, as engineer Chris Porter described: "We were working on a song, again we just had a Juno, LinnDrum and DX7, and we connected them all up so that we could run them off MIDI. After doing some programming, we returned to the studio the next afternoon, I pressed 'play' on the tape machine, the MIDI obviously wasn't right and everything started making these weird noises. The drums were triggering random sounds on the Juno and DX7, starting to make what you now hear as the intro on 'I Want Your Sex': a strange squelching, pulsing bass sound. I went, 'Oh, damn, I'll reset it,' and George said, 'Hang on a second, hang on a second! That sounds really good, doesn't it?' I said, 'It's a bit weird,' and he said, 'Yeah, but if we just take a bit out here and a bit out of there we might be able to use it...' We recorded a few bars of that odd squelching noise, and then it morphs into the song, at which point the bass become the bass part and just the Juno, LinnDrum and DX7 provide the overall landscape."

Michael himself had a similar recollection: "So what happened was, we were writing a much faster Pop song that I did have in my head, called 'Johnny Sex'. We needed to trigger a sound off the Juno 106, and in order to do it we had to take the drum pattern down to half speed. It didn't quite work, but it accidentally set the Juno off to a random pattern, which became the pumping noise at the bottom of 'I Want Your Sex'. I thought it sounded really good, really tribal, and it gave me a totally different idea which I worked around, I just played the other stuff and had it sequenced."

Parts 2 and 3 were recorded the following year during sessions at Puk Studios in Gjerlev, Denmark, as extensions to part 1 (which had been selected for the first single), with part 2 being the one with a "more New York club sound" (having been recorded with a seven-piece brass section), while part 3 was the "romantic" and "altogether smoother" counterpart. For the crossover points, the 56-channel SSL console (with 28 channels on either side) at the Puk facility would be used to bounce from the original multitrack on one side of the SSL onto the new multitrack slave on the other, and George would rehearse the musicians on a particular part before dropping them in on the new track.

Music video
The music video, directed by Andy Morahan, featured Michael and his then-girlfriend Kathy Jeung to emphasize that he was in a monogamous relationship; at one point, he is shown using lipstick to write the words "explore" and "monogamy" on her back, which is photographed and retouched at the end of the video to reveal the phrase "explore monogamy". Spanish model Gloria Rodríguez Veiga was also used for naked scenes in a way that allowed the audience to assume they were the same woman; these shots are interspersed with intentionally blurred footage of George Michael dancing and singing the song.

In a 2004 interview with Adam Mattera for UK magazine Attitude, Michael reflected: "It was totally real. Kathy was in love with me but she knew that I was in love with a guy at that point in time. I was still saying I was bisexual... She was the only female that I ever brought into my professional life. I put her in a video. Of course she looked like a beard. It was all such a mess, really. My own confusion and then on top of that what I was prepared to let the public think."

The video generated controversy over its sexual themes. In 2002, MTV2's countdown of MTV's Most Controversial Videos Ever to Air on MTV included the video for "I Want Your Sex" at number 3. The original video cut appears on the Twenty Five compilation 2-DVD set.

Release
In the US, the song was first featured on the Beverly Hills Cop II soundtrack album, which was released to radio stations in early May 1987. The commercial release of the soundtrack followed on 18 May. An immediate surge in airplay of "I Want Your Sex" as an album cut prompted CBS to release the single in the US later that same month, ahead of schedule. The UK single debuted the first week of June.

"I Want Your Sex" was the second single Michael released in 1987, following "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)", his duet with Aretha Franklin. On the song's daytime radio ban, Michael commented during an interview with Jonathan Ross:

"I wasn't expecting the blanket ban. I think it's unfair because it's the first ban of its kind in a long time and I think that if I were not George Michael then I would have no problem being played on those stations. And it's incredibly irritating having a record out for a couple of weeks and knowing that people haven't heard it."

Despite censorship and airplay issues, an edited version of the song's music video received ample airplay on North American music channels, fueling its popularity there. The single eventually reached number 2 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, the week of 8 August 1987, behind "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" by U2. Moreover, the single remained in the top 10 for six weeks and the top 40 for a total of 14 weeks, becoming one of the most popular dance-pop singles of the summer of 1987. It also climbed to number 2 in Canada, where it ended up becoming the 13th most popular single of the year.

The song reached number 3 in the UK Singles Chart, where the song's reprise maintained an audience for many years thanks to BBC Radio 1 breakfast show host Simon Mayo using a looped version as backing music for his daily feature On This Day in History. It also sold 327,160 there.

Legacy
Although it was one of Michael's biggest hits, the singer ignored the song following its release; he never performed it after the Faith Tour and although the Rhythm Two version appears on Ladies & Gentlemen: The Best of George Michael, it does not appear on the 2006 retrospective Twenty Five; furthermore, the "Monogamy" mix does not appear on the 2011 remastered release of Faith. In an interview with Mark Goodier, included in the large-format book released with the 2011 remaster, Michael said that he still likes the second "Rhythm" but not the first, and that he distanced himself from the song because its production sounded too much like Prince; indeed, "Rhythm 1", as well as a few other tracks on the Faith album (such as "Hard Day"), features Michael simulating female vocals by artificially pitching up and altering his own voice, much the same way as Prince was doing at the time with his pseudo-female alter ego Camille. In the interview, Michael admits that he was "deeply enamoured" with Prince, and adds that he thought it was very bad for him to be infatuated with a colleague of his. Rolling Stone editor David Fricke described this song as "a new bump-and-grind original that sounds more like Prince's stark, sexy 'Kiss' than anything in the Wham! catalog". In 2016, after Michael's death, Andrew Unterberger of Billboard ranked the song number eight on his list of Michael's 15 greatest songs.

Track listing
7"
 * A. "I Want Your Sex" ("Rhythm One: Lust") – 4:44
 * B. "I Want Your Sex" ("Rhythm Two: Brass in Love") – 4:43

12" / CD / cassette
 * A. "I Want Your Sex" (Monogamy mix) – 13:12
 * 1) *"Rhythm One: Lust"
 * 2) *"Rhythm Two: Brass in Love"
 * 3) *"Rhythm Three: A Last Request"
 * B. "Hard Day" – 4:51

CD – 654 601-3 (UK) [1989]
 * 1) "I Want Your Sex" (parts one and two) – 9:13
 * 2) "A Different Corner" – 3:59
 * 3) "Careless Whisper" (extended mix) – 6:30

Official versions

 * "Rhythm One: Lust" – 4:44
 * "Rhythm Two: Brass in Love" – 4:43
 * "Rhythm Three: A Last Request" – 3:48
 * Monogamy mix – 13:12
 * Freemasons club mix – 10:06
 * Freemasons club instrumental – 10:06
 * Freemasons club mix edit – 3:45