The Kings of Rock and Roll (Queen) and their Mega Hit “Bohemian Rhapsody”

I found myself in an interesting situation writing about a choral arrangement of songs by the British rock band Queen. I’d kinda sorta heard of them, but I would have been hard pressed to come up with any of their song titles. Until, that is, I started listening to their four hits included in the arrangement by Mark Brymer, “A Tribute to Queen.” ‘Hey, wait a minute!’ I thought. ‘That’s that song they play at football games.’ (“We Will Rock You.”) “Hey, hold on here! That’s the song Chicken Little sings after he’s improbably scored the winning run for the Oakey Oaks middle-school baseball team.’ (“We are the Champions.”) ‘Hey, what gives? Those are Weird Al Yankovic songs.’ (“Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Another One Bites the Dust,” only they’re really “Bohemian Polka” and “Another One Rides the Bus.” Not a Weird Al fan? Well, I’m sorry to hear that.) I was also vaguely aware that there’d been a movie not too long ago titled Bohemian Rhapsody which seemed to be sort of a big deal and which was about the band. (The lead actor, Rami Malek, won Best Actor for 2018.) And the name “Freddie Mercury” rang a faint bell. Well, I have to say that it’s been pretty interesting to dive into the world of Queen. I used to be a real music snob, but singing with the my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, has revamped my musical taste. We sing such a variety of music, from ABBA to Alberti and Broadway to Biebl, every piece prepared and performed at the same high level of artistry, that it’s simply impossible for me to maintain my snooty attitude.

I’m not going to cover the history of the band, nor am I going to discuss all four songs in Brymer’s medley. Instead I’m going to limit myself to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” probably Queen’s most ambitious and popular song, and see how much ink, digital or literal, has been spent (wasted?) on trying to figure out the meaning of its lyrics. (I am reminded, once again, of that elusive short story about Shakespeare’s time traveling to the present and visiting a literature class dealing with his plays. He staggers out, clutching his head, saying something like, “What a multitude of words is here!”) It’s indisputable that the band worked extremely hard on the song and that it was the result of a long period of thought and development by the band’s lead vocalist/pianist Freddie Mercury. The official music video was recorded over the course of three weeks in 1975, and its elaborate tracks and overdubs had to be done on the somewhat-primitive audio equipment available at the time:

The entire piece took three weeks to record, and in some sections featured 180 separate overdubs. Since the studios of the time only offered 24 track analogue tape, it was necessary for the three to overdub themselves many times and “bounce” these down to successive sub-mixes. In the end, eighth-generation tapes were used. The various sections of tape containing the desired sub-mixes had to be spliced (cut and assembled in the correct sequence). [Queen guitarist] May recalled placing a tape in front of the light and being able to see through it, as the tape had been used so many times. (quoted in Wikipedia)

So what are the lyrics about, exactly? I’m going to give you several different explanations/interpretations, again culled from that fount of all wisdom and knowledge Wikipedia:

Music scholar Sheila Whiteley suggests that “the title draws strongly on contemporary rock ideology, the individualism of the bohemian artists’ world, with rhapsody affirming the romantic ideals of art rock.”

Okay then. Now here are some perspectives from Freddie Mercury himself

Mercury refused to explain his composition other than to say it was about relationships.

B-u-u-u-u-t–Mercury also said:

It’s one of those songs which has such a fantasy feel about it. I think people should just listen to it, think about it, and then make up their own minds as to what it says to them … “Bohemian Rhapsody” didn’t just come out of thin air. I did a bit of research although it was tongue-in-cheek and mock opera. Why not?

On the other hand, though:

Still others believe the lyrics were only written to fit with the music, and had no intended meaning; D.J. Kenny Everett, who played an influential role in popularizing the single on his radio show, quoted Mercury as claiming the lyrics were simply “random rhyming nonsense.” . . . [Queen drummer] Roger Taylor maintains that the true meaning of the song is “fairly self-explanatory with just a bit of nonsense in the middle.”

As you chase through the verses, however (which are included at the bottom of this post), somewhat of a story line emerges. Here’s my final Wikpedia quotation, which I find to be very helpful in summing up a possible overall arc of the storyline:

Critics, both journalistic and academic, have speculated over the meaning behind the song’s lyrics. Some believe the lyrics describe a suicidal murderer haunted by demons or depict events just preceding an execution. The latter explanation points to Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger, in which a young man confesses to an impulsive murder and has an epiphany before he is executed, as probable inspiration. When the band released a “Greatest Hits” cassette in Iran, a leaflet in Persian was included with translation and explanations. In the explanation, Queen states that “Bohemian Rhapsody” is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution, he calls for God saying, “Bismillah” (“In the name of God” in Arabic), and with the help of angels, regains his soul from “Shaitan” (“the devil” in Arabic).

The above paragraph raises some additional questions, though, doesn’t it? Queen released a greatest hits collection in . . . Iran? Sometime after the Iranian Revolution, the rise of the Ayatollah Khomenei and the reinstatement of Islamic fundamentalism? Wouldn’t Queen have been considered rather subversive by the Khomenei government? Western music was strictly censored, after all. In addition, Mercury was gay, and homosexuality was (and still is) considered a crime in the Islamic republic. So how on earth did Queen get to release its music there? I did  a little digging, and here’s some of what I found out:

Freddie Mercury’s birth name was Farrokh Bulsara, and his family identified as Parsi, or Persian. (Persia is the ancient name for the area now called Iran. The Bulsara family had immigrated to India by the time Mercury’s father was born.) Mercury himself was quite proud of his heritage, at least as an adult, and even left instructions before his 1991 death (at the tragically young age of 45 from HIV/AIDS) that his funeral should include elements of his family’s religion, the monotheistic faith called Zoroastrianism. His name change was almost certainly motivated by his desire to become a part of the British rock scene and not meant to signal a repudiation of his ethnic heritage; as he said in an interview: “That’s something inbred, it’s a part of me. I will always walk around like a Persian popinjay.” His inclusion of the Arabic word “Bismillah” isn’t all that mysterious, by the way, as it’s the first word in the Koran. Mercury had attended school with very diverse student populations, both in his birthplace Tanzania and in the UK, so he would have been familiar with the term.

In the years before the establishment of Iranian Islamic fundamentalism in 1979, Iran, or Persia, was seen as exotic and desirable, a place of “roses and nightingales.” A number of rock stars made pilgrimages there. Western music was very popular under the Shah’s rule, and even after the Islamic takeover bootleg recordings were sold widely, with Queen’s music leading the pack. After all, 70% of Iran’s population at the time was under the age of 30. Finally, in 2004, permission was given by the Tehran government for the Queen greatest-hits collection to be sold legally, although the collection didn’t include any love songs. (This omission may have been an effort by the government to avoid the whole issue of Mercury’s sexuality; that’s not clear.) I’m assuming that this concession was based solely on Queen’s popularity and was seen as a sop to be thrown to Iranian youth. It was this recording, as noted above, that included the translation and explanation of the lyrics for “Bohemian Rhapsody.” If you’ve been paying attention, though, you’ve noted that this Iranian release was 13 years after Mercury’s death, and it was also almost 30 years after the release of “Rhapsody” in 1975. So who wrote the notes? Apparently it was someone in the Iranian government:

Concerned about the messages hidden in the song, Iranian authorities insisted that each copy of the cassette be issued with a leaflet that explained that while the singer of the song had indeed “killed a man,” it was by accident, that he then goes on to call on God for forgiveness (“Bismillah!”) in order to prevent Beelzebub from getting his soul. (“10 Things You May Not Know about Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’“)

So, ironically enough, this whole scholarly edifice about the deeper meaning of “Rhapsody” may have come, not from the band itself, but from some low-level Iranian bureaucrat.

Here’s a great performance of Brymer’s medley by a combined high school choir:

If you didn’t follow the link above, here’s the original “Bohemian Rhapsody” video in all its white satin glory (and yes, that “billion” with a “b” for the number of views):

Here are the lyrics. I’ve include a few entirely optional notes at the end.