Queen’s ascendency began at around the same time as the first residents were moving their Axminster carpets and Party Sevens into Tower Hamlets’ Robin Hood Gardens, the Smithson-designed Brutalist estate that would go on to become a typical example of how post-war ‘streets in the sky’ concepts were almost always doomed to fail. Five decades on, just one small section of Robin Hood Gardens has survived for posterity. It’s been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum to, presumably, warn future generations of what can happen to a neighbourhood when you combine too much cheap concrete with not enough public consultation.
Thanks to Freddie Mercury and co., one solitary example of the very worst excesses of overblown 1970s musical bad ideas persists, too. This one isn’t locked away in a museum. It’s likely you’ve heard it very recently, no matter where in the world you live, or how selective you are with your Spotify shuffle settings.
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was released half a century ago this week, and the six‑minute monstrosity has, somehow, convinced multiple generations that operatic wailing, asinine lyrics and improbable time‑signature gymnastics remain the pinnacle of popular music. To commemorate the song’s 50th anniversary, perhaps it’s time to ask the question few in polite company dare to utter: why is this terrible track still tolerated?
Where to begin? The dirge-like, lugubrious ballad at the start? The operatic interlude that sounds like Gilbert and Sullivan’s bastard progeny in loon pants? Or the Brian May guitar solo that sounds like something Jimmy Page would have rejected for being too slapstick?
Then, about half an hour later, there’s the supposedly pathos-laden finale. ‘Nothing really matters to me,’ sings Freddie, a statement that must be considered to include our sense of resentment at having endured this mess when we could have listened to the Beatles singing ‘Help’ thrice in the same timespan.
The music critics got it right the first time around. Back in 1975, Melody Maker’s Allan Jones was forthright in his bafflement: ‘The significance of the composition eludes me totally… [it’s] contrived to approximate the demented fury of the Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing The Pirates of Penzance.’ Pete Erskine of NME noted that it ‘sounded self-important’, a critique that today might appear prophetic, as the song has become a perennial fixture of public life. Resistance is futile to its ubiquity.
The six‑minute monstrosity has, somehow, convinced multiple generations that operatic wailing and asinine lyrics remain the pinnacle of popular music
The thing is, Freddie was a phenomenal singer, and tracks such as ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ and ‘You’re My Best Friend’ are bona fide pop classics. But this just makes it even stranger that this interminable novelty hit is Queen’s most revered song. It’s like singling out ‘Octopus’s Garden’ or ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ as being the pinnacle moment of the Fab Four. Still, it seems we can’t get enough of hearing someone yelling: ‘Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?’
The other bands that bored the pants off us in 1975, the high point of progressive rock, are little heard today. They had their moment back in the latter stages of Harold Wilson’s last term, but Jethro Tull and Genesis are as relevant to today’s culture as Mike Yarwood and Berni Inns. Similarly, the majority of the architecture of the early to mid 70s now lives on only in the form of occasional retrospective exhibitions and fading design catalogues. So my idea is that we should do to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ what the V&A have done to the Smithsons’ Tower Hamlets project – namely keep a small section of it (perhaps the ‘devil on the side for me’ bit) in a vault in Abbey Road as a time piece and take the sonic bulldozers to the rest of this blethering nonsense.
As O’Brien said to Winston Smith: ‘Change within our lifetime is impossible.’ Yet the occasional missive, polemic or counter-argument can still be distributed against the cult of Bo Rhap. And, once victory is ours and the consensus is that the song is utter, irritating, overblown rubbish, then, and only then, can we get started on ‘Love Shack’.
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