George Michael performing on his Faith World Tour, in 1988. PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL PUTLAND / GETTY

Like many Americans, I first saw George Michael when he came blasting onto MTV alongside Andrew Ridgeley, in Wham!, in 1984. They wore white pants and white “CHOOSE LIFE” T-shirts, nearly glowing on a white stage, singing “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” and it was utterly dazzling, a little baffling. “Jitterbug.” Snap, snap. “Jitterbug.” Snap, snap. The song started dizzily, urgently, with undertones of organ music. “You put the boom-boom into my heart,” Michael sang, with zippy oo-oos in the background. “You send my soul sky-high when your lovin’ starts.” Who was this beautiful man, with his beautiful hair, his beautiful face, his lashes, his two gold hoop earrings? What was happening? In sixth-grade lunchroom conversation, we tried to sort it out, but we couldn’t. All we knew, instinctively, was that this performer was giddy in his sense of himself, his voice, his craft, and so were we. Michael was rhyming “go-go” with “yo-yo” and telling somebody to stay in bed with him and hitting delirious high notes, and we were powerless to resist; we couldn’t stop dancing.

Michael, who died yesterday, at home, on Christmas, at fifty-three, was twenty-one when “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” came out. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, in London; later, he took to referring to himself as the Singing Greek. He wrote his own songs, creating irresistible melodies with seeming ease; he had a supple voice with an impressive range, capable of crazy falsetto, effortless belting, real intimacy. When he sang and danced, you couldn’t look away. He met Andrew Ridgeley in high school. They experimented with ska, and then with a kind of pop brashness. On the first Wham! album, “Fantastic,” from 1983, they poked around in styles from disco to rap. It went to No. 1 in the U.K. On the mind-blowing “Wham Rap,” Michael sang “Wham! Bam! I am! A man!” in falsetto, and then he rapped. “Wham Rap” was wise, in its way: its subtitle was “Enjoy What You Do,” and it praised the virtues of being yourself. (“Maybe leather and studs is where you’re at!”) On the “Fantastic” album cover, Michael and Ridgeley wore leather jackets, leaning into each other against a pink background.

By “Make It Big”—more leaning, on a white background—they’d clearly figured something out. That album combined eighties-pop appeal with a little funk (“Everything She Wants”) and a lot of old-fashioned pop fizz. A bunch of its songs, like “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “Heartbeat,” “Freedom,” and “Credit Card Baby,” evoked a little Motown, a little Brill Building, a little bubblegum. For a twelve-year-old girl ready to bop around, Wham! was just what the doctor ordered. I bought “Make It Big” on vinyl at Caldor, and would play it loud in the living room, dancing. I hadn’t developed a sense of irony yet, and I went in whole-hog. The full melodrama of “Careless Whisper,” with a saxophone solo that, once heard, can never be forgotten, sounded like palm trees, swooning, and intrigue. I used to lie awake at night, imagining romantic scenarios involving sixth-grade dances—stolen glances, drama in the soda line, someone dancing with a person and then dancing with someone else—and “Careless Whisper” was the soundtrack. “Tonight the music seems so loud / I wish that we could lose this crowd.” Oh, it was all too much.

That summer, my good friend saw Wham! in concert, in England. Michael had sat on the edge of the stage, swinging his legs and singing a song called “Last Christmas,” dreamily. We’d never heard of this song before, and I was profoundly jealous. It was a time when you could feasibly be bonkers for Wham!, Tears for Fears, Sting, Prince, Michael Jackson, U2, Bruce Springsteen, and David Bowie all at once, and we were, we were, we were.

In 1985, Michael sang on “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” that wondrous, well-intentioned, lyrically cringeworthy masterpiece (he’s the “But say a prayer, pray for the other ones” part), and played with Elton John at Live Aid. (Here’s a follow-up, from 1991.) Musically, he continued to evolve. Wham!’s third album, “Music from the Edge of Heaven,” got a bit more mature—“Edge of Heaven” was a sort of thinking man’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” and “A Different Corner,” which was pained, sorrowful, and regretful, delved further into sincerity. Wham! broke up in 1986, with an eight-hour farewell concert at Wembley, for seventy-two thousand people. They had sold twenty-five million albums. In his subsequent solo career, Michael amazed us all.

I don’t think we were expecting the breadth and confidence of “Faith,” Michael’s 1987 solo album. “I Want Your Sex” startled and delighted my junior-high classmates. Even after “Like a Virgin” and the rest, “I Want Your Sex” was audacious, hilarious, thrilling. No more bubblegum. And it was fun to sing. Its sound—a little synth, some spare beats, sexy vocals on top of sexy vocals—was utterly in command. The lyrics were respectful but all business—or business with a little philosophizing, in the tradition of so many great historical lovers. “Sex is natural / sex is good / not everybody does it / but everybody should,” he told us. (More recently, he updated this on Twitter.) On the album, he demonstrated his facility with a broader range of styles, and he had a more butch aesthetic—stubble, jeans, sunglasses, a bluff attitude. “Faith,” the single, began with portentous church organ—which it then swapped out for stripped-down acoustic guitar, handclaps, and more sexual forthrightness. Gone were the saxophones and synthesizers: “Faith” seemed to offer us the real, raw him. Think of it now, and you imagine Michael dancing to it in the video: the sparseness, the urgency, the butt-shaking. You had to dance to that, too. He was polished and earthy at once. “Well, I need someone to hold me, but I’ll wait for something more,” he sang. “I gotta have faith.”

Sexually, his message still seemed to be “I do what I want.” But the vulnerability was new. “Father Figure” was sensual and mesmerizing, and, like so many of his songs, melodically irresistible. (One morning in 1990, listening to it in a kind of trance, I very gently rear-ended a classmate’s car at a stoplight.) In the “Faith” era, Michael, not yet out, populated his videos with beautiful women; in later years, he became an L.G.B.T. hero. Here he is in 1992, singing Queen’s “Somebody to Love,” very satisfyingly, in a rehearsal for a Freddie Mercury tribute, with David Bowie observing in the background. (“I’ve just got to get out of this prison cell … can anybody find me somebody to love?”) He slays us, and seems to impress Bowie; here he is singing it at Wembley, looking just as comfortable commanding an enthralled stadium of tens of thousands. (Before he sings, he says, “So please, for God’s sake, and for Freddie’s sake, and your own sakes, please be careful, all right?”)

His song “Freedom ’90,” from his 1990 album “Listen Without Prejudice,” when you hear it now, is a marvel of self-assertion, self-critical but joyous. “Gotta have some faith in the sound / it’s the one good thing that I’ve got.” It wasn’t a remake of Wham!’s “Freedom”—he’d just written a new song about freedom, reflecting on that earlier era. “I was every little hungry schoolgirl’s pride and joy, and I guess it was enough for me,” he sang. In the video, he obscures himself: male and female models lip-synch his vocals, and the leather jacket from the “Faith” video is set on fire. “There’s someone deep inside of me / there’s someone I forgot to be,” Michael’s voice sings.