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Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ Foreshadows Subversive Strides Toward Social Progress
If you watch for the hidden messages within Boy George’s 1983 music video…it models what modern-day quests for equality should espouse, in hindsight
7 min readSep 7, 2022
Most fans of 1980s music remember the song “Karma Chameleon” performed by the British JonesGen vocalist Boy George. Released in 1983, this song boasted an accompanying music video that was memorable for its buoyant world-building.
If you’ve never seen it, I’d invite you to check out the Karma Chameleon music video in its entirety:
But, aside from it being a really nifty example of audio-visual art, I suspect that Boy George and his band (Culture Club) were intentionally trying to slip hidden messages into this moving-picture motif.
On a subconscious and cerebral level, those undertones were designed to inspire mavens of music to embrace unspoken inner desires.
