It’s a song we’ve all heard at least once in our lifetime, And it was probably not like anything we’ve heard before. Yes, I’m of course talking about Queens legendary single Bohemian Rhapsody, Even 40 years later the initial release it has been one of the most influential and most memorable songs which have been ruling may our playlists.
But has anyone wondered why this six-minute single that no one ever thought would be a hit became one of the most famous songs which have ever been written?
This song was initially released in 1975 When Freddie Mercury began writing it as an operatic piece with the title “Real Life”. There is one thing we need to know, After Queen's success in there last album “Sheer Heart Attack” Queen was given complete creative freedom and complete control over the next project/album. And it’s obvious that they took that creative freedom in a productive way and ran with it.
Effect on People:
Bohemian Rhapsody had quite a rare effect on people, which is like it was one of those songs, when the first time we heard it, we pull over to the side of the road and think “What the hell in seven kingdoms is this?” Very few songs have done that and Bohemian Rhapsody is one of them
Bohemian Rhapsody is too different for its time and still is today. Most of the pop songs last around three minutes, but Bohemian Rhapsody was a six-minute pop single which also included an opera right in the middle of the song. The song was fully realized, it was a little bit of “Where do we go from here?”, the song also managed to become a ubiquitous part of the culture and something that never gets deleted from our playlists and something which is still being used in movies because nobody has still done that sounds like Bohemian Rhapsody.
The Music Industry:
It advanced a tradition of suites in pop music, meaning it is not a continuous song i.e: A group of different genre songs put together. If people refer to Bohemian Rhapsody as a song it is kind of a misnomer, it’s actually three or four songs put together.
Bohemian Rhapsody can be divided into five different sections
- A Cappella (introduction)
- A Ballad (Freddie Solo)
- Opera (Whole Band singing)
- Hard Rock (Freddie solo)
- Finally a reflective Coda (Freddie solo)
It is also kind of unusual for a popular single to not include a chorus while combining different genre, styles and lyrics.
This innovation of mixing up the genre’s started around the mid-’60s. It started basically with The Beatles song “A Day In The Life” an Epic song that pieced together different ideas into a cohesive whole. Queen also used the same idea and they pushed it way over the top.
And we can also feel how top they went, from the lyrics which names characters from Italian theatres (Scaramouche), Quotes from the Quran(Bismillah), and the name of a demon(Beelzebub), And this part of the song actually sounds like a room full of people commonly known as the choir was just sung by Four people (Freddie Mercury, Roger Taylor, Brian May and John Deacon).
The Science and Technology Behind the making:
To achieve the sound they wanted Queen used a technique known as reduction mixing, Most of the pop songs we listen today uses a lot of audio tracks and each track is reserved for different instruments and different vocals and then these tracks are combined to make one whole song. But back then technology limited the number of audio tracks that could be used.
Queen used a twenty-four track tape to store the vocals and instruments and once these twenty- tracks are filled the tracks are combined and stored in a track and then they have twenty-three tracks left and so on.
In the end, Queen almost had about 180 individual tracks that had been put into a twenty-four track tape. This method had its own drawback once it is recorded you can’t go back to remove a particular track, as we do now. The removal of tracks must be done physically the part which is to be deleted must be cut by using a razor blade and then you can join it by using white tape. But now it is very easy digitally.
Everything Queen did then was destructive, so it took a lot of commitment and a lot of knowledge to be able to piece that stuff together and have it sound good.
Consider yourself sitting on a piano and singing Bohemian Rhapsody from the start to the finish, you probably would say “Wow, that’s interesting” but you probably won’t that it’s going to be a hit and it’s gonna endure for the next 40 years. What made to endure is the sound they created.
Queen’s Thoughts:
The man behind this song was Freddie Mercury, he saw this song as his baby, unlike most of Queen’s songs that were written collaboratively in the studio, this was a song that according to the guitarist Brian May was “All in Freddie’s Head” before they began to record it.
Freddie Mercury talked about this song as an “Experimentation in Sound” the experiment was to see if he could get was in his head his sonic preconception, out there and if something unique could be realized in the studio. The important thing that Bohemian Rhapsody has resonated in the past 40 years is that it embodied something very intense which is Freddie Mercury’s personality and life. That record is an oral extension of Freddie Mercury’s self-consciousness without shame. As a performer, there hadn’t been a Freddie Mercury before Freddie Mercury.
In a time when all pop songs sounded the same, this song came out of nowhere and maybe that’s the reason why we still can’t stop listening to Bohemian Rhapsody. With just this one song Queen became something that very few artists managed to achieve, Legends.
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