In a period when heteronormative masculinity was in crisis, Wham! redefined young masculinity as having fun, having camaraderie, and removing identity from work. And as Vic Clarke argues, what they said in the 1980s still resonates today.

Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do)
Wham! (George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, 1983)

In 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s government entered the military into the Falklands War, Terrence Higgins became one of the first reported to die from AIDS, among other gay men, and Britain’s unemployment rate had reached 10% – the highest rate since the Great Depression of the interwar period. Across the four nations of the UK, industries were on strike, and prospects for young working-class men seemed dim. At the same time, Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael’s first album, Fantastic, brought sunny, camp pop to the radio waves.

Feminist scholarship of the early 1980s worked to uncover the hitherto ignored voices of women in labour history, from Dorothy Thompson’s emphasis on the radical domesticity of women in the Chartist movement to Anna Davin’s reassessment of working girls to Florence S. Boos’ study of working-class female autobiography. However, the historiography of male labour has continually focussed on the derivation of working-class masculine identity from independent, ‘skilled’ labour. This is directly tied to the ability to financially provide for a family within a heteronormative society (the emotional labour of which remains understudied), and to politically provide for the same family through defence of the value of skilled labour within an inherently hierarchical capitalist society. The ‘Wham Rap’, pleasingly, challenges these assumptions:

‘Wham! Bam!
I am! A man!
Job or no job
You can’t tell me that I’m not’

In a period of a crisis of heteronormative masculinity, Ridgeley and Michael redefine young masculinity as having fun, having camaraderie ‘with the boys in the line’, and removing identity from work. Manliness is neither derived from nor removed by being a ‘coal boy’ or a ‘dole boy’, directly challenging Thatcher’s desire the next year for a ‘return to Victorian values’ defined by the privileging of industry over idleness. During the economic depressions of the 1840s, 1870s, 1930s and 1970s-80s, emphasis on the relationship between (heterosexual) masculine identity and labour is continually reasserted, whether by liberal government regimes or the campaigns of trade unions. Wham! importantly assert a separation between identity and work, and a radical focus on pleasure over industry. Thirty years later, under a present-day Conservative government, wave of industrial action, and political debate over the existence and lives of LGBTQ people, it is unsurprising that contemporary feminist punk songs such as Dream Nails’ Corporate Realness (2020) similarly affirms that ‘you are not your job/work is not your life/you must do what you must do in order to survive’. Labour history could and should invite us to question both historical relationships between peoples, work, and political belonging, as well as questioning our own relationships with work. After all, as Wham! ask, do you enjoy what you do? If not, just stop. Don’t stay there and rot.

Vic Clarke is working towards a monograph on the Northern Star as a singularly Chartist title in media history. She is also a Teaching Fellow in Modern British History at the University of Warwick, teaching on nineteenth and twentieth century Britain.