The bar down the block from me uses George Michael’s Careless Whisper as a sign that it’s time for everyone to start gathering up their things – its saxophone blast is a hell of a way to snap the variously inebriated to attention. It’s also a very effective way to get me involved in a last-call monologue enumerating the reasons why George Michael is truly the greatest pop star of the MTV era, besting even his mononymic peers with his powerful songs and bullshit-averse attitude.

Michael Jackson had the moves; Madonna had the moxie; Prince had the spry, shifting sexuality. George Michael had the voice, an instrument that balanced the smoothness of Sade Adu with the ebullience of Whitney Houston and supercharged any pop song it encountered, a voice that sounded relatable even as it leapt octaves. Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, which shot him to the top of the charts in America, was a canny pop track with a ridiculous hook, but Michael’s giddy read of the song’s chorus and falsetto-heavy ad-libbing on the outro hinted at what his voice would later do.

Joining in on his songs, both with his duo Wham! and solo, was an irresistible prospect, an invitation to pop communion of the holiest kind. Michael’s voice could enter another dimension with zero notice at all, soaring into high octaves at crucial moments both heartbreaking and joyous, and going low when the situation called for it. When he exhorted the Wembley Stadium crowd to sing along with Queen’s passion-drenched Somebody To Love at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert in 1992, he was bestowing his pop-star power on the masses – “I want to hear every single person,” he yelled, inviting tens of thousands of people to join together and revel in music’s power to heal, if only for a little while.

His pop stardom was partially fuelled by his public chafing against the gig’s more aggravating aspects – the casting off of Wham!’s teenybopper shackles at the outset of Faith, which opens with a sombre church organ take on the flamboyant Freedom”; the ceding of the spotlight to his lyrics and a parade of supermodels during the Listen Without Prejudice era; the lawsuit he eventually lost against Sony, which he accused of “professional slavery”; the way the video for Outside rebuked tabloid speculation about his sexuality; the cheeky interviews he gave in his later years. This reaction to stardom seems perfectly normal when you take a step back and realised what a pain in the ass being famous must have been; there’s no better proof of its relatability than Freedom ’90, probably his biggest karaoke-bar staple despite its detailing of a very specific set of problems. (Not many people have been invited to shake their ass “for the boys at MTV”, after all.)

But couching the specific in the universal is what pop does best, and Michael was a master of the form. (And a staunch defender of it: “How can you not realise the elation of a good pop record is an art form?” he demanded in Rolling Stone in 1988.) In comparison to other pop icons who died this year, Michael had a small recorded output; he released six studio albums, the last of which came out in 2004, and a smattering of live compilations and one-off singles. The albums, from Faith on, are stuffed with ideas and passion, driven by his surgical approach to writing and arranging songs for maximum effect. His live recordings further reveal his deep respect for pop as a form and as an ideology; his covers paid tribute to his elders – Stevie Wonder, Queen, the Doobie Brothers – with verve and revealed how he kept up with his contemporaries, taking on the work of Terence Trent D’Arby and Seal while also taking detailed notes on how they were pushing pop forward.

Wham! boys … Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael in 1985. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images

While he eschewed the later-career trend-chasing of his MTV-era peers, the devotion he had to his craft was apparent even to preteens who mooned over the moody image of him and his childhood chum Andrew Ridgeley on the cover of Make It Big. I know this because I was one of those youngsters, going so far as to write “Maura [hearts] Wham!” on my copy of the duo’s second album in order to mark it as mine. While I was initially drawn in by Ridgeley’s cheekbones, I stuck around through Wham!’s breakup, and Michael’s eventual solo career, because the songs were thrilling, spinning like tops perched on a ledge, ready to fly off in another direction at any moment. Michael displayed reverence for all the right things – compositional craft, searing vocals, kindness, writing pop songs to make the world feel, briefly, like everything was OK – while also feeling ambivalent toward the aspects of his job that distracted from them. It was a combination that made him a pop star who wasn’t so much down to earth as undeniably human, full of contradictions that fueled his undeniable, one-of-a-kind talent.