Song Review - Bohemian Rhapsody

This has to be the first song Drowned In Sound reviews. Right?

The song "Bohemian Rhapsody" by none other than Queen could not, quite frankly, be pulled off by anyone other than Queen. The song is nonsensical brilliance, but at the time, it seemed like three minutes of suicidal thought and another three minutes of gibberish. There was legitimately zero chance of the song topping the charts in the 1970's, yet something unexplainable happened with this masterpiece of a song.

Upon its release as a single, "Bohemian Rhapsody" became a commercial success, topping the British charts for nine weeks straight, and selling more than a million copies before January of 1976. The song itself is a six-minute suite consisting of several sections without a chorus: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock stent and a reflective coda. The song is a more accessible take on the progressive rock era of the 1970's with far more innovation than ever seen before since perhaps the Beatles. This musical format of constantly changing time, tempo, tone, and key was a previously undiscovered area of music that was only found in classical pieces of Mozart and Beethoven (which coincidentally is probably where the term "symphonic rock" came from). In other words, the song is a masterpiece unlike any other rock song.

I first heard this song when I was young and instantly fell in love with the "Galileo, Galileo" part because I was a child and meaningful verses and choruses meant nothing to me. When I got older, I began to truly appreciate the song in its entirety, but I still sing the operatic parts louder than the rest.

In 1991, after Freddy Mercury's untimely death, the song was re-released as a single to commemorate Mercury's passing and the song reached the number two spot in the U.S. Billboard Top 100's list for twelve weeks and was eventually inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004. There it would serve as a memory of how creative music can really become. Imagine a world where "Bohemian Rhapsody" didn't exist. Pretty hard right? Queen gifted us with one of the most savvy, complex, chaotic, and industrious tunes that will ever grace out ears, and there will never be another song quite like it.