Fifty years ago this very day, Queen released Bohemian Rhapsody as a single. By the time it reached record stores it was already familiar to many, having received extensive radio play by the likes of Kenny Everett (“Excuse me while I scrape myself off the ceiling,” was Everett’s reaction after its first spin). So the song climbed the charts quickly. Within a month it had gone to No 1, where it then sat for nine weeks, from the end of November to the end of January. And Bohemian Rhapsody has stayed lodged in pop music’s collective consciousness ever since. It’s a song so instantly familiar that you only need to hear that first multitracked vocal smear of “Is this the real life?” to replay all five minutes and 55 seconds of it in your head. You’re probably doing it right now, in fact.
But how did it get so firmly lodged in the pop canon? After all, and this is hardly an original observation, but Bohemian Rhapsody is a deeply weird mega hit, a song that explodes all the usual rules of success. Everywhere you look there are contradictions. It’s a multimillion seller that has no chorus, numerous tempo and key changes, ambiguous and difficult-to-parse lyrics and a long running time. Musically, with its Gilbert and Sullivan operetta leanings, it has more in common with the 19th century than the 20th, let alone the 21st, but it’s also the most streamed 20th-century song this century, a musical throwback that nevertheless dragged pop into the music-video age. It’s both celebrated as a queer anthem or an extended metaphor for coming out, and is the British armed forces’ favourite song. It’s an extremely silly, borderline novelty hit that is also sort of deeply serious: “If I’m not back again this time tomorrow/ Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters.”
And for a song often garlanded with the phrase “universally beloved”, Bohemian Rhapsody is disliked by plenty of people, from the critics who famously panned it at the time of release to the Spectator columnist who stuck the boot in just a couple of days ago (“… convinced multiple generations that operatic wailing, asinine lyrics and improbable time‑signature gymnastics remain the pinnacle of popular music”). On Reddit’s Unpopular Opinion board, there are so many variants of “Bohemian Rhapsody is bad” that the sentiment surely no longer qualifies as an unpopular opinion. Even the extremely genial football commentator Martin Tyler hates it, for some reason.
I’m not quite in the Spectator-Redditor-Tyler faction myself, but I don’t exactly love Bohemian Rhapsody. A little of what Freddie Mercury described as its “pompous flair” definitely goes a long way for me, and bits of it are borderline unlistenable to my ears – “Scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango” is nails down a blackboard. There’s also the not-insignificant factor of just having heard it too many times – at weddings and karaoke sessions (where it remains the most popular song to perform), on greatest No 1s countdown shows, and during late-night viewings of Wayne’s World. Still, in the overplayed song stakes it doesn’t feel as fatigued as, say, Mr Brightside; that’s despite Bohemian Rhapsody having a 28-year head start in overfamiliarity on the Killers’ indie disco staple.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t sound as exhaustingly overplayed as some of the worst offenders. For all its familiarity, half a century on there’s still an aura of complexity and mystery to the song. That’s evident not just in the musicianship, all those multitracked, million-part harmonies, but of course in its lyrics, which Mercury never unpacked, even reportedly to his bandmates. “People should just listen to it, think about it, and then make up their own minds as to what it says to them,” Mercury suggested, and into that vacuum interpretations have poured.
Who is the man with the gun against his head, and who is the person pulling the trigger? Is it, as widely believed, Mercury coming to terms with his sexuality by killing his old, more straight-seeming self? (I’m intrigued by the theory that it’s actually a tribute to Herschel Grynszpan, the gay Jewish teen whose assassination of a German diplomat was used as a pretext for the events of Kristallnacht – though I’ve not seen that suggested anywhere else.) And what about that pomp rock middle section? Is there a meaning to the flurry of Gallileos and Figaros and fandangos, or is it just gibberish to facilitate the “tongue-in-cheek and mock-opera” feel Mercury said he was striving for? Or both?
It’s a song that has inspired endless fascination: just look at its Wikipedia page, with its hundreds of citations and footnotes. And, of course, it has inspired endless musicians too – though not in a conventional way. For all its uniqueness, Bohemian Rhapsody didn’t really usher in a new sound or genre: in fact, it represents the last knockings of one, prog rock, before it was washed away by the coming tide of punk. But instead Bohemian Rhapsody invented its own subcategory of song, a multipronged showstopper that could be replicated across genres and generations.
Today, as it nears the 3bn mark on Spotify and the 2bn mark on YouTube, it’s hard to imagine Bohemian Rhapsody ever fading into obscurity. In its singular strangeness, it feels future-proof. It’s walled off from changing tastes and genres, destined to be sung on hen dos and karaoke nights for decades to come, the unknowable song that everyone knows.
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