Bohemian Rhapsody Song Video Showcase

With the record company against taking this song to market as a single or using it as the front runner on the album, A Night At The Opera, Freddie devises a plan.

The band gives a recording to a DJ with instructions "not to play" the song on the radio. The song is leaked and becomes a hit, forcing the record company to take note and move forward with the idea of making this a hit single. You have to admire Freddie's persistence and ingenuity.

Photo used under Creative Commons from Orange Beard.

19759 weeks at #1 in the UK
1976Freddie Mercury wins Ivor Novello Award for
Bohemian Rhapsody
1977Best British single of the period 1952-77
1977British Phonographic Industry voted it best single
of the past 25 years
19915 weeks at #1 in the UK
1991One of only 5 songs in the UK to hit the #1, leave
the charts, and hit #1 again at a later date
1992Only song in the UK to be at #1 in 4 different
years (because it crossed from Dec into Jan
on both occasions that it hit #1)
1992MTV Video Music Award for Best Video from a
Film
2000Second to "Imagine" by John Lennon in a Channel
4 television poll of The 100 Best Number 1s
2002Guinness Book of Records in 2002 as the top
British single of all time
200210th in BBC World Service Poll for greatest song in
the world.
2004Inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame

"I know what the song means, I don't think it's that difficult. I think it's very self-explanatory. There's just a bit of nonsense in the middle."

band mate Roger Taylor

Fellow Queen member, Roger Taylor, is reportedly the only one who knows the true meaning of the song and he had promised Freddie he would not tell. Either that's true, and there's an actual meaning to the song, or that's not true and perhaps there is no meaning. That would be hard to understand as most writers have an idea of a message they're trying to convey whether their medium is book, poem, or lyric.

Freddie was passionate about his music, this song in particular, telling the entire production team that they would not be holding anything back on the creation of Bohemian Rhapsody. Why would he do that for a song that was nothing but a meaningless stream of words?

It helps to understand Freddie's personal life at the time he wrote this song. In 1975, Freddie began his first homosexual relationship, effectively ending his relationship with his long-time girlfriend, Mary Martin, although their friendship would last the rest of his life.

I can't imagine the conviction it must have taken for Freddie Mercury to come to grips with his identity and make this change. It could not have been easy. While I always understood the song more literally as the story of a young man who has purposefully killed someone and decides he will face his penalty, I now think the song had a much more introspective and personal meaning for Freddie.

Singing about a man who had killed another and confesses to his mother, I wonder if Freddie was not learning to deal with the fact that in accepting his homosexuality he was, in essence, killing the person he had been in order to evolve as the person he was meant to be. That can't have been an easy thing to explain to either his mother or his girlfriend. In doing so, was he worried that he might be ruining all the success he was working so hard to build? That his fans might run regardless of his talent?

And some fans did, in fact, run - for the world is full of people who have no tolerance for others when their preferences in matters that are really none of their business are not similar to their own.

Perhaps I'm romanticizing the song and it has no more meaning than a fictional story of another man, but I have to wonder. Regardless, you can't deny that a man with little formal vocal training, with the ability to play music upon hearing it, who could write complex musical arrangements and who had a vocal range nearly unparalleled by other male singers was not one, incredibly gifted artist.

Photo used under Creative Commons from michal.kolodziejski.