Popsmacked
Every generation gets exactly the Queen it deserves
Forty three years later, I still remember the captain of our high school football team belting out Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the locker-room after gym class.
“I SEE A LITTLE SILHOUETTO OF A MAN!” he shrieked, literally, at the top of his lungs.
“SCARAMOUCH, SCARAMOUCH WILL YOU DO THE FANDANGO.”
Let me provide some context: It’s 1975. Homophobia is rampant. If someone you know is gay, or acts in a way that can be perceived as gay, or is friends with someone who can be perceived as gay, they (and you) will automatically become a target.
Despite this, a raft of flamboyantly androgynous performers like Elton John, David Bowie and Queen’s Freddie Mercury have — with wry, inventive flair — embraced the gender-bending charms of glam rock and transformed the fabric of pop music.
At the top of the playlist: Queen’s theatrical six-minute opus that — with operatic tangents, highpitched falsettos and nonsensical lyrics — is the most inventive pop song to reach the Top 10 (it peaked at No. 9) since the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.”
Which, in this context, translates into an alpha-male sports hero joyfully strutting about the lockerroom — as enlightened as a rock — unaware the singer he is scrupulously emulating will die from AIDS-related ailments a decade and a half later.
Now jump to 1992. Freddie Mercury — having come out as HIV positive mere hours before his death — has passed away, his music relegated to oldies stations as classic rock and metal give way to the angsty, humourless ethos of the grunge era.
And along comes Scarborough’s Mike Myers, the “Saturday Night Live” comedian whose satirical
“Wayne’s World” needs an iconic rock tune for its head-banging cast to sing along with in the movie’s driving sequence.
Guns N’ Roses, insist the producers. They’re hip. They’re cool. They’ll sell tickets.
Nope, says Myers. “Bohemian Rhapsody” or I walk.
Long story short: Myers wins, the movie is a smash and the song described by Rolling Stone as “either a prog-rock benchmark or the most convoluted novelty song ever recorded” jumps back on the charts and makes it all the way to No. 2. Now jump to last Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards.
Among the nominees for the prestigious Best Picture Drama prize are two art house favourites, “BlacKkKlansman” and “If Beale Street Could Talk,” and two populist powerhouses, “Black Panther” and the presumed shoo-in, “A Star is Born.”
Rounding out the list — as pundits silently snicker — is “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a passionately lead-footed Queen docudrama that scored a measly 49 per cent approval rating on Metacritic and has the same odds of winning, oddsmakers declare, as Donald Trump building a concrete wall along the U.S. southern border.
Yes, it boasts a charming performance by Rami Malek. Yes, it has a killer soundtrack. Yes, it has defied the odds to become the highest grossing music biopic of all time.
But it’s clunky, tone deaf and insulting to the LGBTQ community, goes the argument, and the dialogue is kind of ... basic. Not to mention its troubled production history that saw its director fired under a cloud of sexual assault allegations.
And then — get this — it wins, making it an automatic frontrunner for the upcoming Oscar race, sending critics into conniptions and landing its revered title song back on Billboard for an incredible third time, where it climbs all the way to No. 33.
To put this in perspective — and I don’t mean this as an insult — it’s like “Bride of Chucky” winning the Oscar for Best Picture over “Apocalypse Now.”
How could this happen? How did Queen, against the odds, triumph once again? Who do they think they are — ABBA? Journey? The Beatles?
“Queen is still edgy in many ways,” notes University of Waterloo professor Andrew Hunt, who teaches two well-attended rock and roll themed history courses.
“The band’s metal(ish) edge, combined with the obvious opera and classical influences in its music, and Mercury’s flamboyance, resonate at a moment when a lot of today’s music seems mass produced and downright uninteresting. Also, Mercury’s life getting cut short by AIDS adds to the band’s mystique.
“It’s no accident that I also get a lot of students who love Joy Division (Ian Curtis) and Nirvana (Kurt Cobain), and why in my Beatles class, students love John Lennon. There’s something about a doomed rock singer that still reaches across time and space and grabs young people, and won’t let go.”
I have a theory that every generation gets exactly the Queen it deserves.
In the ’70s corporate rock era, they were a bracing antidote to generic sludge like Boston and Kansas, melding the heavy riffs of Led Zeppelin with the absurdist wit of Salvador Dali and falsetto wailing of Maria Callas.
“OH MAMMA MIA, MAMMA MIA, MAMMA MIA LET ME GO!” wailed the football captain, dancing around the change room in his underwear.
“BEELZEBUB HAS A DEVIL PUT ASIDE FOR ME, FOR ME, FOR MEEEEE!!!”
In the ’90s — an era of grim, sardonic irony — the band became an irreverent touchstone for a bygone age where ambition was key and excess lauded. That “We’re not worthy!” catchphrase didn’t just apply to Alice Cooper, you know.
And now it’s Queen: The Movie, an affectionate homage that resurrects the band’s infectious, hook-laden catalogue in an era of monotonous hip-hop beats and presents its lead singer — in timely 2018 fashion — as ...
“Freddie Mercury: The Artist, tormented with coming to terms with his own sexual feelings during a less than understanding time, but courageously pushing on in spite of his outrageous camp stage presence,” notes Don Ross, who volunteers at the Spectrum LGBTQ+/Rainbow community centre in Kitchener.
Ross, a 68-year-old “late bloomer gay man” who came out when Queen was at its ’70s peak, saw the film three times and found it “excellent.”
“The MUSIC was my main reason for going,” he confides by email. “I grew up with this music. But I also wanted to see how they would portray the relationships of a gender fluid person (bisexual/gay/whatever) in a national homophobic culture of the ’70s & ’80s. I think the movie demonstrated that Freddie was far more than his sexuality.”
A lot of complaints centred around the film — a PG version of an R-rated life — playing coy about this very issue.
“I don’t think it skirts his sexuality at all,” insists Ross, addressing Mercury’s mid-film orientation flip. “I think Freddie is confused about his own gender fluidity and is trying to ensure he’s not gay by pursuing someone he thought got HIM as a person.
“It leaves people wondering at the end, was he gay or bisexual? It was made to let people decide for themselves.”
It doesn’t matter, in the end, any more than the fact the film leaps from 1981 to 1977 as if the intervening four years happened in reverse. Chronology, schmonology. Queen is, and remains, a band for the ages, a musical phoenix that — with a cartoonish sense of purpose — finds itself newly relevant in every era.
“Is this the real life?” crooned that now middle-aged football captain, unwittingly predicting his own slide to irrelevance. “Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality.”
There is no escape from reality. But sometimes, in a six-minute pop song about the tragic hand of fate, by a band of self-described misfits, with a singer who flirts with damnation, you might find Beelzebub is your friend.
And if that’s the case, can an Oscar for Best Picture be far behind?