Almost everyone has seen the movie by now with Rami Malek, the pharaoh from Night at the Museum 2 and 3 who played Freddie Mercury. Freddie Mercury was a British singer-songwriter, record producer and lead vocalist of the rock band Queen. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.
Queen was always a household name in my family growing up, so I always listened to them in the car with my family when I was little. But you know how you listen to a song so much it becomes second nature to all the instrumentals, rhythm and lyrics of the song so you’ll sing the lead, background music and everything else in the song. Don’t be ashamed, I do it too! But I never really stopped to understand the story behind the lyrics, until now.
After research I learned Freddie Mercury wrote the lyrics, and there has been a lot of speculation as to their meaning. Many of the words appear in the Qu’ran. “Bismillah” is one of these and it literally means “in the name of Allah.” The word “Scaramouch” means “a stock character that appears as a boastful coward.” Mercury’s parents were deeply involved in Zoroastrianism, and these Arabic words do have a meaning in that religion. His family grew up in Zanzibar but was forced out by government upheaval in 1964 and they moved to England. Some of the lyrics could be about leaving his homeland behind.
Guitarist Brian May seemed to suggest this when he said in an interview about the song: “Freddie was a very complex person: flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood. He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put a lot of himself into that song.” Another explanation is not to do with Mercury’s childhood, but his sexuality, it was around this time that he was starting to come to terms with his bisexuality, and his relationship with Mary Austin was falling apart.
Whatever the meaning is, we may never know. Mercury himself remained tight-lipped, and the band agreed not to reveal anything about the meaning. Mercury himself stated, “It’s one of those songs which has such a fantasy feel about it. I think people should just listen to it, think about it, and then make up their own minds as to what it says to them.” He also claimed that the lyrics were nothing more than “Random rhyming nonsense” when asked about it by his friend Kenny Everett, who was a London DJ. The band were always keen to let listeners interpret their music in a personal way to them, rather than impose their own meaning on songs, and May stated that the band agreed to keep the personal meaning behind the song private out of respect for Mercury.
Source: http://www.queenonline.com/queen
HCXO,
Alexandra