Yeah - cultural appropriation - how dare they!!
FYI:
"In popular music, a cover version, cover song, or simply cover, is a new performance or recording by someone other than the original artist or composer of a previously recorded, commercially released song."
So, recorded in English - cover in English. Originally recorded by English pop duo Wham - although Michael did the whole thing himself:
His music lives on - even in Russia!In December 1984, two future seasonal staples were vying for Christmas No 1: Do They Know It’s Christmas? by charity supergroup Band Aid, and Last Christmas by Wham!. Admittedly, the competition wasn’t exactly cut-throat. George Michael not only sang on the Band Aid single, but also donated the royalties from Last Christmas to the same cause. Yet the Christmas single saturation that year did lead to a chart curiosity: Band Aid’s victory meant that one of the most beloved and brilliant festive songs never reached No 1.
The years, however, have only seen Last Christmas’s ubiquity grow: 3.7m copies sold and countless cover versions later (by everyone from Taylor Swift and Whigfield to Ariana Grande and Good Charlotte), it’s now the best-selling single to never reach the top of the UK charts. But this year, on the first anniversary of Michael’s death, with a fan campaign returning the song to the charts, that may be about to change.
[...]
The 21-year-old wrote, produced, performed and painstakingly played every single instrument on the track. Having gradually rid the recording process of interfering producers, managers, record company executives and even his bandmate Andrew Ridgeley, the only people admitted into the Last Christmas studio were Michael’s engineer, Chris Porter, and two assistants – not that they had much input. Porter remembers “desperately wanting to play sleigh bells”, but like everything else, they were jangled only by Michael himself.
!
