Bohemian Rhapsody
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At the end of the documentary, a group of literary scholars analyze the lyrics. Their consensus is that Mercury’s lyrics tell us more about the listener’s inferences than about Mercury’s own meaning. A quick Google search on the song will bear this out, with a wild array of conjectures.
One of the reasons that we might want to exclude “Bohemian Rhapsody” from the murder ballad tradition is its obvious artifice. The song is clearly “about” something other than what the ballad portion of the song says it’s about. This is true of any murder ballad that doesn’t purport to describe a real event, though, and is also often the case even with one that does. Despite its glam rock trappings, it still functions in the same way artistically, at least potentially.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” illustrates a point that I pursued in my recent post on Hurray for the Riff Raff’s “The Body Electric.” The violence in “Rhapsody” is not about the violence, but about the artistic power of telling a story of a terrible act, and telling it in the first person. The point is not to celebrate violence, but to use its horribleness to excavate something important within us, as singers or listeners, that may have no actual relation to violence.
Mama…. Mama?
Found meme
Few songs we’ve explored have been as commercially successful as “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It charted at least three distinct times: at the time of its release, the time of Mercury’s death, and at the time of its role in the opening of the Mike Myers/Dana Carvey film “Wayne’s World” (illustrated in the gif above, and in this now classic movie scene). With its operatic aspects and its length, many told the band it didn’t have a chance on commercial radio. A savvy radio DJ performed some expert guerrilla marketing for it, and it climbed the charts.
Queen also turned “Bohemian Rhapsody” into a landmark music video, years in advance of the MTV era. Queen’s “Rhapsody” video was produced to present the song on Britain’s “Top of the Pops,” because the song’s arrangement is so complex that the band can’t present the whole thing live (or lip-synched). Even in concert, the band would abridge the song, intersperse it within a medley, and/or exit the stage while a portion of the operatic stage was played via a recording.
The iconic opening silhouette of the Queen video also served as the launching point for a parody video of the song produced by The Muppets in 2009. The surviving members of Queen authorized portions of their audio track to be used in the video.
Hilarious, and perhaps unsurprisingly, not a shred of murder ballad left. Despite the anecdotal evidence I’ve gathered that younger listeners aren’t really all that put off by Mercury singing that he killed a man, the producers of this video appear to have judged that a Muppet, even Animal, was not the proper voice to deliver such a fatal confession.
Whether this was bowdlerizing for kids or just a pivot to make it funnier, I can’t say. Perhaps it’s both. It does make me wonder whether kids’ tendency to tune out the material that’s too much depends on who they hear singing the song. In my conversation with my school friend, I suspected not, as she supposed, that her kids were desensitized to violence in music, or at least I understand that desensitization differently. My thought was that it gets tuned out, not heard for what it is, but I’ve been given reason to think that perhaps it’s neither tuning out nor desensitization.
A few weeks ago, a friend shared with me this essay about developmental psychologist Peter Gray’s work on the role of “inappropriate” play in children’s lives. Gray shares George Eisen’s stories of child’s play among Jewish children in concentration camps (in Eisen’s Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games Among the Shadows) to demonstrate the value that such games had for equipping them for their horrific, real-life situations. Gray argues:
In play, whether it is the idyllic play we most like to envision or the play described by Eisen, children bring the realities of their world into a fictional context, where it is safe to confront them, to experience them, and to practice ways of dealing with them. Some people fear that violent play creates violent adults, but in reality the opposite is true. Violence in the adult world leads children, quite properly, to play at violence. How else can they prepare themselves emotionally, intellectually, and physically for reality?