Bohemian Rhapsody: Marvel or Nonsense?

Given that he was such an impressionable young man, it still amazes me how indifferent he was to see Queen perform ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for the first time on Top of the Pops in November 1975. Watch the BBC documentary entitled ‘The Making of Bohemian Rhapsody ‘Last week, only Sir Bob Geldof seems to have been as impressed as Queen’s contemporaries, today’s young rock stars, fans, critics, and even the University of Oxford Dons lined up to give a song clichés. that, to quote a line from the lyrics, this listener would need ‘a gun to the head’ to listen all the time. Justin Hawkins from The Darkness (or at least he was when the documentary was made), described it as ‘the Holy Grail’, and I was struggling to include it among the best singles of 1975 let alone all time.

The documentary managed to remove some of my prejudices and has allowed me to listen to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in a more favorable light, but some of my reservations remain, leaving me confused if it is a masterpiece that I have not been able to understand, or simply a farce. novelty record.

The show was hosted and narrated by actor Richard E Grant, who is clearly in the masterpiece field and during the hour-long piece, the critical distance is restricted to twenty seconds of Geldof stating in a nutshell that he was unable to see from what all the fuss was about. about. Legions upon legions of Queen fans no doubt yelled ‘what has he done?’ on their television screens, but in the three or four years that followed ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ Geldof co-wrote some good three-minute singles for his group, the Boomtown Rats, which were concise and unpretentious, words that couldn’t be used to Describe the largest Queen. blow – or a push from the Queen.

Among what I feel there are several misconceptions about ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (and this documentary virtually backed up from the start) is that it was the first ‘long’ song to be a huge hit. Well, the length of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ (6:13), ‘Hey Jude’ (7:10) and ‘Maggie May’ (5:12), didn’t stop them from reaching number one. It is true that long tracks like ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ or ‘Layla’, two songs that inhabit a sacred ballpark, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ do not come close to entering, they had to be edited to enter the list of simple. There is no way that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ could be released without any of its various sections (a cappella, piano ballad, opera and hard rock), it would make even less sense and here I make my first concession to Queen by releasing it as a first single. place. It was a brave step when the likelihood of it being a hit when timed at nearly six minutes was greatly reduced, particularly at a time when success on the singles charts was heavily dependent on radio play, and by admission. from guitarist Brian May, who reflected. they badly needed a hit single at the time.

May and drummer Roger Taylor exit the show as kind men who are justifiably proud of the song, its production, and its enormous success. When asked what story Queen frontman Freddie Mercury was trying to tell as the songwriter of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, Taylor said the song was: ‘pretty self-explanatory with just a little bit of bullshit in between.’ We all know the Scaramouche, Fandango, Thunderbolt and Lightning, Galileo and Bismillah passage, which is said to reflect Mercury’s spiritual influences, although comedian Kenny Everett, a close friend of the band, might not have been kidding (for once) when he described it as “random rhyming nonsense.” Not that there’s anything wrong with the lyrics being silly – no one has ever explained what ‘Tutti Frutti’ or ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ means and to be honest, does it matter? Where I thought the documentary was inadvertently funny was when Grant, dressed in dark clothing to enhance the mysticism, started saying the lines’ Mom just killed a man, put a gun to his head, pulled the trigger now that he’s dead ‘, to the camera. Too often, rock lyrics sound ridiculous without the music and this was one such example, but the show took an even stranger turn when a group of Oxford University Dons were asked to interpret the words – a chore. which for the most part he abandoned. them scratching their heads (not bad), although one scholar made a comparison between the section ‘I see a small silhouette of a man’, with a part in ‘A Day in the Life’ by The Beatles, which was a connection that never had done before, but now it seems obvious.

I think it’s fair to say that lyrically ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is not ‘Waterloo Sunset’ or ‘Street Fighting’ Man ‘, but what it does show in the powerful climax is that Queen as one voice, the aggregation of three instruments could rock with so much force. to have somebody. They emerged in the early 1970s to fill a gap somewhere between David Bowie and Led Zeppelin, they played with a finesse and style that none of the bands that broke through at the same time can match, and they were also working at a level of much higher imagination. as shown in the mythical video that accompanies ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and here I make another admission.

For years I have dismissed the idea that it was the first music video, pointing to short films made by The Who and The Kinks (to name just two), but in reality these were just promotional clips – what Queen did was make the first video created. by the way. where the technology of the day was pushed to the limit. Innovative graphics and direction have allowed the song to retain a timeless feel – watching the video today, you might be mistaken for placing it anywhere between the progressive rock stances of 1971 and the heavy rock revival of ten years later, so that the fact comes somewhere. in between (and twelve months before the Sex Pistols swore in Bill Grundy) makes him somewhat more apt.

So, has my perception changed by watching the documentary? Up to a point yes. I keep claiming that Queen made better records before and after, but I applaud the experimentation and sense of adventure that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ included and now fully recognize why it is a cultural milestone in terms of popular music.

But perhaps the only true way to know will be the next time you hear it on the radio.