128. Queen, "A Night at the Opera"

 

Do you ever think about the confluence of events that had to transpire exactly right to produce a specific moment?  The fact that you are wherever you are right now reading this is the product of a series of increasingly improbable consequences, piled up on top of one another.  If I hadn't finally reached a breaking point and broken up with my ex the exact time I did... years later, no 9-year-old sitting in the room next to me playing Pokemon on a Nintendo Switch.  No Nintendo Switch, probably.

And so in January 1964, the Afro-Shirazi Party overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and established a new government in the former British protectorate.  The Bulsara family, like many other ethnic Arabs who lived in Zanzibar, fled the resulting violence and emigrated to England, where they lived in Middlesex and then London.  Farrokh, the oldest Bulsara child, who had been going by Freddie, graduated from Ealing Art College in 1969 and joined a succession of bands before landing in a band called Smile with guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor.  Later joined by bassist John Deacon, they changed the name of the group to Queen.  Farrok, of course, adopted the stage name Freddie Mercury.  Without the Afro-Shirazi Party, probably no Queen, no "We Will Rock You," no "Bohemian Rhapsody," the next-to-last song on this album.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" has taken on a life of its own, of course, and is a cultural touchstone like The Godfather or Planet of the Apes or Andy Warhol's soup cans - something that you can reference and everyone will know what you're talking about.  If nothing else, it's certainly the most complicated song to ever enter the rock canon, a three-phase pocket opera that required 200 tracks of overdubs over eight generations of 24-track tape.  Mercury largely wrote the song himself on piano and then the band painstakingly worked it out over months and then spent three weeks recording it.  Mercury, May, and Taylor worked on the vocals for something like 10 to 12 hours a day.  The end result is a massive, overblown, genius, rapturous song, surely one of the monuments of rock and roll.  Fuck it, I'm just gonna put the video here, go ahead and take 6 minutes out of your day and enjoy it.

1.5 billion views on YouTube, as befits what might have been the first music video recorded just for the purposes of being a music video.  But that's another story.

That's not even it for this album!  There's also "You're My Best Friend," a sunny, Beatles-esque pop gem driven by Deacon's Wurlitzer piano that's about exactly what it says it's about.  And "I'm in Love With My Car," written and sung by Taylor, about roadie Johnathon Harris' love for his car, a Triumph TR4.  No, really, it's about a car:

When I'm holding your wheel
Аll I hear is your gear
With my hand on your grease gun
Oooh, it's like a disease, son
I'm in love with my car
Got a feel for my automobile
Get a grip on my boy-racer rollbar
Such a thrill when your radials squeal

Musically, the album is all over the place, typical of Queen, who were never afraid to incorporate whatever kind of genre floated through their (typically Mercury's) head.  You can hear metal, straight rock, chamber pop, ragtime, avant-pop, you name it, sometimes all in the same song.  Their fearlessness and refusal to be constrained would be a big influence on a lot of bands going forward.  Can you have My Chemical Romance or Muse or Coheed and Cambria without Queen?  Unlikely.

Mercury, of course, died of complications from AIDS in 1991.  The world lost a true musical visionary, and one of the technically most talented singers of all time as well.  

Is this album in my personal Top 500? It's great!  But not really.