Social
mid 70’s, dull, depressing times with miners’ strike, 3 day week, rising unemployment. Glam rock could be seen as a reaction against all this, a need to break free from mundane existence. The camp behaviour of Freddie, along with the band’s name may be obvious hints at homosexuality today but such things were so little talked about, or homophobia was so widespread, that it never really entered people’s minds that Freddie might be gay. Everyone had long hair, the bright, almost cross-dressing clothes and make-up came from David Bowie, who was also thought of at the time as being heterosexual. Bowie’s image was an obvious act, with Space Oddity and Ziggy Stardust helping people to ally such weirdness with playing the part of an alien. All members of Queen were university students, with Brian May being particularly intellectual – their interest could therefore be said to be in intellectualising rock music by adding classical features (as used by prog rock bands) and a wide range of musical and literary influences. They were not, in other words, a band which needed to change the world or express any working class origins – they needed to show how clever they were and to move people with strong melodies, non-guitar based harmonies and bold structures.
Cultural
The song is taken from the album “A Night At The Opera”, a title which reinforces the idea that Queen wanted to add “high culture” to pop music, giving us the impression that they are going to present us with an evening of aristocratic entertainment. The title is also a reference to a 1930’s Marx Brothers film, anyone realising this would understand that it implied a certain madcap humour. Queen, like any serious intellectual band (eg Led Zep), were album-driven – they considered their serious work to be a whole album, like a symphony, regarding singles as a necessary afterthought. Ironic that the album in this case should be completely outshone by the single. Queen’s musical influences were:
The Beatles – wide range of influences, so much so that you cannot say what the Beatles’ style is, other than eclectic, pioneering studio work, experimentation, all band members as songwriters
Pink Floyd – the same, but also the use of larger structures
Led Zeppelin – the heavy side of Queen, along with an interest in Elizabethan tonality, English folk heritage and Tolkienesque lyrics
Jimi Hendrix – wide range of sounds from guitar, studio effects such as panning
Classical – extended structures, functional harmony, genuine modulations, contrasting sections
Difference between modern performance and first performance
When Queen performed this song live they left the stage during the opera section and came back on for the heavy section to make it obvious to their fans that a tape was playing. Perhaps nowadays onstage computers and synthesisers could make a better job of reproducing the song live. Queen at the time of Bohemian Rhapsody were proud to state on each album “no synths”, in other words, the musicianship (even Brian May’s harp playing on Love of My Life) was not artificially made or generated but entirely due to the band members. The current musical using Queen’s music, We Will Rock You, has as its plot the idea that the world is being taken over by mindless electronic, computer-generated music, so Queen would be unlikely to take too much advantage of such technological progress. The sound quality of a modern digital recording would vastly improve on the original, multilayered vocals and guitars would now lead to no loss of audio quality, and might perhaps have triggered further experimentation. But the world of recording has changed, few artists now have the licence or the studio time that Queen had then and songs are just composed differently these days – computer whizzkids manipulating samples and loops, copying and pasting to a dance friendly beat rather than serious musicians seeing just how far they can go in creating intellectually stimulating, virtuosic, emotionally engaging works.
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