“Is this the real life?” I thought to myself as a movie trailer titled Bohemian Rhapsody appeared online. At first, I was very confused but after watching the trailer, I was overjoyed; A biopic about one of my favorite bands, Queen. I thought it was going to be TERRIBLE because recently all the movies have been pretty bad. Yet, I could not stop thinking about it. So once it came out, I caved in and saw it. Let me just say… it is 100% worth seeing, maybe even twice. Now I could go on and on about Queen, and that is exactly what I am going to do.
Queen started off as a college band where Brian May, their guitarist, was studying to become an astrophysicist, and their drummer, Roger Taylor, was studying to become a dentist. These two, including Freddie Mercury, were in a band called “Smile” that played college gigs and nothing else. During this time, they went through a slew of bassists before finding John Deacon. They released their first song as Queen titled “Keep Yourself Alive,” and released it twice, but both times it failed to reach the top 40. To keep a really long story short, Queen kept releasing music and it caught the attention of many people.
Now with successful music comes touring. If any of you have seen pictures from a Queen tour, you’ll notice that Freddie Mercury normally wore some exquisite outfit. Some even say Freddie was most known for his flamboyant stage outfits. I, personally, believe that’s what makes him so unique and special. No one during the 70’s was wearing anything like he did. As a matter of fact, no one was even making rock music like Queen. While there were numerous different rock’n’roll bands during this time, how many of them released an entire album that had operatic sections on each song? Literally none of them, besides Queen.
In case you were completely unaware, Queen’s biggest song “Bohemian Rhapsody” features an entire opus section. You know that one part where everything goes absolutely insane? That’s it. Their music producer was against them releasing “Bohemian Rhapsody” as a single because they thought no one would listen to a six-minute song on the radio. It’s funny how that’s been their biggest hit. I should also mention that the music video for it is pretty awesome. Along the lines of music videos, Queen had three of their music videos banned from MTV. The biggest controversy was over the “I Want To Break Free” music video which got banned because all the members dressed up as woman and were portrayed as housewives. MTV banned it because it seemed to be homosexual.
Now if you see Bohemian Rhapsody, which I highly recommend, all of this information will be played out. However, there has been controversy over the movie because it “moves too quickly”. Obviously, they can’t show every single thing about Queen in a two-hour movie or else it’d have to be like a 20 part documentary. The cool thing is at the end they recreated Queen’s iconic Live Aid performance, which is deemed “the greatest performance of all time”. Let me just say, they did a good job of perfecting it and making it identical to the real thing. The movie is so fun and entertaining and even if you are not the biggest Queen fan, I guarantee that after seeing this movie, you will only listen to Queen for about a week.