I would love to see George Michael shoot the dog

Political arguments made in popular forms have a knack of making their points powerfully

Constant reinvention is the aim of the typical pop career these days. Kylie's done Fluffy, Rock Chick, Tragic Widow and Judy Garland before alighting on her very successful current incarnation as a diva of inconceivable grandeur and cool. Madonna's reincarnations are too many to count; some successful, others very much not so – the Ying Tong songs in Hindi, or going all Cockney Rebel on us. Anyone who wants to have a lengthy career has to be prepared to unveil an entirely new persona from time to time, assuring us on each occasion that we are now seeing the real them.

George Michael has managed this process so adeptly that one might legitimately ask why, with his latest move, his audience should take him seriously. You wouldn't necessarily have predicted that the delicious 80s pop of Wham! would lead to the saturnine and sardonic ironies of recent years. There's always been a suggestion that these developments are part soul-searching, but partly the progress of a very astute man.

When he was caught waving his willy at one of LAPD's finest, he didn't go down the Hugh Grant route of going on David Letterman to say "I've let everyone down"; he released a very funny and catchy song, "Outside" about it, with an admirably lewd video. It was, in part, an honest thing to do, and, undoubtedly, a very smart career move. His claim to be cool hadn't been so high since "Last Christmas" came out.

So how should we take this latest move? "Shoot the Dog", which is released this week, is, startlingly, a viciously satirical protest about international politics. It's mildly cryptic, and partly a ridiculous Spitting Image fantasy about watching the World Cup in bed with Cherie Blair "while Tony's Stateside", but it couldn't be angrier about the clash of fundamentalisms, the Bible Belt versus al-Qa'ida, or more critical of the way our foreign policy seems to be run from Washington these days.

It does it, of course, in terms of pop: "Mustapha/ Mazeltov/ The Gaza Boys/ All that holy stuff./ I got the feelin' when it all goes off,/ They're gonna shoot the dog... The Ayatollah's gettin' bombed yeah/ See Sergeant Bilko having fun again... Nine nine nine gettin' jiggy/ People did you see that fire in the city?/ It's like we're fresh out of democratic,/ Gotta get yourself a little something semi-automatic yeah..."

Accompanied by a very vulgar and raucous video in Beavis and Butthead style, in which a cartoon George insults world leaders and incidentally joins the Spice Girls, the Simpsons and the Village People, this is quite an unexpected move in George's career. One knew that he was an intelligent and thoughtful man, but it must be said that the only sign of a revolutionary spirit he showed at the beginning of his career was that he managed to persuade the world that a man could adopt the Farrah Fawcett Majors flick, too.

But is that a reason not to listen to him, or to write him off? Politicians are always apt to try to confine the political debate to the political classes – "It's all rather more complicated than that, Jeremy." Contributions are accepted from reasoned, august commentators, in prose, but anything else tends to get shrugged aside. You can well imagine that "Shoot the Dog" is going to be as water off a duck's back; people will feel entitled to write off the argument, because of quite trivial factors. It rhymes; it is made by a man who has committed grave misdemeanours in the areas of police officers, hairdos, and Christmas ditties; and it is a cartoon.

But this is a mistake. There is no reason to suppose that the views of pop singers about international relations are any more worth listening to than those of the average plumber, and one can reasonably complain that a rich pop singer is in a position of power without responsibility. There is no reasoned response to a huge pop protest song, and no one would buy a record setting out the Government's commitment to an independent defence policy even if Madonna could be persuaded to sing it.

Nevertheless, political arguments made in popular forms have a knack of making their points powerfully, and massively. Politicians are helpless, faced with a Gillray, a Bob Dylan, or a Spitting Image, and they should know that these apparently trivial contributions are in fact orchestrating a powerful sense of resistance.

We probably ought to set aside the undoubted fact that George Michael is releasing this, in part, for the sake of his career, and listen to what his song is actually saying. It isn't cynical; he clearly believes it, and his song will spread what is already a widespread conviction still further. As it happens, I think the argument, such as it is, is mistaken, but it is worth taking seriously. If politicians start by thinking that a cartoon or a pop song can't possibly be worth listening to, they will end by not listening at all.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk