Not long ago, in the spring of 2021, I cited my favorite song as Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I announced it to a roomful of about 20 people, no less. At my call center job in Neenah, we had Friday morning meetings in the conference room. Each employee was asked to give a “get to know me speech” to the team. We were given a number of prompts. “What are your hobbies?” “Who are your heroes?” “If you could time travel, which year would you go back to and why?” And “What’s your favorite song?”
As I write this, I gotta say, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a masterpiece, but it’s been surpassed by “Two of Us,” “Modern Love,” “Shadow Stabbing,” “Paranoid Android,” “Castles Made of Sand,” and “Landslide,” in random order. Plus a few more. And I’d only choose one under threat of a flamethrower attack. I still adore the Queen epic, but it’s like getting divorced from somebody I truly believed was the one.
My manager, Tim, played in a band, and we bonded over groups like Deftones and Rage Against the Machine. He was taken aback by my choice.
“Really?” he said, squinting his eyes and scratching his stubble.
A few coworkers nodded in approval of my choice.
“Hell yeah,” Cheryl said. That tickled me because she said her hero was Jesus.
Marvin clapped and said, “Good answer.” It was like we were teammates on the Family Feud. I kinda miss that dude.
Tim’s nonplussed reaction stuck with me the most, though. We had gone on a few deep conversational dives, music-wise, and my #1 tune left him puzzled. I think he was expecting something less conventional from an overthinking weirdo like me.
I met some cool, supportive people as a customer service rep or whatever I was. The problem was the job. I was miserable in that line of work. I had to make myself less miserable, and I did so by getting a new job as a painter. It was my second stint at my friend Cal’s painting business. Painting beat trying to explain to hard-of-hearing old men that the serial number they had to find to refund their Braun Series 9 Pro could be found under the long-hair trimmer in a tiny, black-on-black font. Hell, I should’ve got a bonus for every time I had to say, “Yes sir, you might need a flashlight and a magnifying glass, and I don’t know why the numbers are so small.”
It was August of 2022 when I made the change. That’s when the Queen got dethroned. “Bohemian Rhapsody” started to annoy me. The problem was repetition.
We had an old radio at the painting shop. Cal had just taken over the place from his retiring dad. The radio was a relic from the prior regime. When we painted doors and trim at the homebase, with its metal roof and old stereo, only a few stations came in clearly. So, we listened to the classic rock station that broadcasted out of Appleton. It had been years since I’d listened to FM. To my chagrin, the formula had become even more repetitive.
We started at 7. By noon, we were done with the same 5 songs by Bon Jovi and AC/ DC, sick of the same 4 songs by Guns ‘n’ Roses and Green Day, exhausted with the same 3 songs by Kiss and Nirvana, and laughing at the odds of hearing “Bohemian Rhapsody” again in the next hour—which seemed like a 50/50 bet.
I’m not bashing any of these artists in this story. In fact, I’m a fan of a couple of them. But the corporate radio format has done everything in its power to kill the thrill of rock music. Instead of using these 40 or 50 blueprint rock hits as a foundation to elevate other bands in the vein, or even just go deeper past the surface of the marketable groups they have chosen, these stations force feed people a regurgitation of those cookie-cutter 40 or 50 songs, everyday. There are few outliers. The old white men at the top are gonna make enough money until they retire. They’re not taking chances. They don’t care. “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” weather, ads, repeat.
Why didn’t I bring my JBL speaker to the shop? I’m a better problem solver than that. Could we manage for three weeks until I thought of bringing the speaker to work? No way. We could not manage. After two weeks, we tapped out to 105.7. Cal bought a new sound system for the business. Better days were ahead (until I got sick of comedy podcasts).
Ever since that time in my life, I have vacated the title of my favorite song. It might be “Life of Illusion,” “Walls,” “Maps,” “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” “Why Can’t I Touch It,” or “God Only Knows.” Put a gun against my head and I still don’t know. Only with the threat of a flamethrower poking at my beard could I even hazard a guess.
But I would like to give “Bohemian Rhapsody” its proper dues. It was my #1 for years for good reasons that had nothing to do with corporate radio garbage.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” was released as a single on Halloween of 1975. How cool is that? Doesn’t that fact just sound badass? A highlight of their classic album A Night at the Opera, the song was ranked #17 on Rolling Stone’s 2021 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The music video has been viewed almost 2 billion times on YouTube. The vocal performance of Freddie Mercury is as iconic as anything else in rock history. As a listener, one might wonder what is really going on with these lyrics, but what matters more is that we’re all onboard with wherever Freddie and his band are taking us.
I treasure this song because it is both tragic and funny, serious and detached, self-righteous and self-mocking, in the same 5 minutes, 55 seconds statement of art. It’s a ballad, then an opera, also a parody, then it thrashes and kicks ass as we suddenly find ourselves headbanging, then it’s a ballad again. Its layout is not just unconventional and unique. For such a popular tune, it’s a unicorn.
The way I see the lyrics, Freddie tells a story that’s mostly straightforward. Aside from the operatic part, when we get those odd shout-outs to Scaramouche and Galileo, the song is about murder, remorse, and confession. A young man kills his lover, feels consumed with guilt and regret, and confides in his mom.
The headbanging section harkens back to the crime of passion. It’s a flashback to the killing. Boiling with anger, the singer wails, “So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye/ So you think you can love me and leave me to die?/ Oh baby, can’t do this to me, baby.”
So, a couple is breaking up in spectacular fashion. The self-described poor boy kills a man, as he later tells his mom. Put a gun against his head, pulled the trigger, now he’s dead and all that. The scandalous part of the narrative, for the mid-70s especially, is that the homicidal breakup was between two men.
The band treats this aspect of the story with subtlety. But if you break it down, yeah, it’s the passion-jealousy-betrayal-murder-remorse cycle happening between two dudes. It’s on-brand for Queen to partake in alternative sexuality. Like David Bowie and other Brits who dabbled in glam, they were LGBT friendly over a decade before those letters mean what they mean now.
So, here we are, breaking down this grandiose epic with its passion, heartbreak, murder, remorse, and struggle to find meaning and define reality. We feel for this young man who has taken a life and ruined his own. We relate to feeling wronged by and pissed-off with someone we cared about. The main character reverts to being a helpless child pleading to his mom for mercy from this cruel world. It’s sad, vulnerable and relatable. The song is both a tearjerker and a headbanger, with storytelling that’s a Queen blend of Johnny Cash and David Bowie... But there’s even more to it.
The crazy operatic section. This tune gets delightfully unhinged at about the three-minute mark. Band members Freddie Mercury, Brian May, and Roger Taylor sang their vocal parts for up to 12 hours a day during the three-week recording process. Their vocals were overdubbed 180 times by the group and producer Roy Thomas Baker.
Composing the epic was meticulous work that paid off with a captivating sound. As for the content, though, what is going on here?
Well, the narrator descends to hell, and it’s pretty funny. The group gives shoutouts to four names: Scaramouche, Galileo, Figaro, and Beelzebub. The most cryptic aspect of breaking down this song is decoding the reason why (if any) these figures were used.
I’ve enjoyed “Bohemian Rhapsody” since it was featured in an iconic scene in the 1992 comedy Wayne’s World. Thirty-two years later, I’m finally asking the question: Who the hell is Scaramouche?
Wikipedia to the rescue: Scaramouche is a clownish minstrel character whose name translates to “little skirmisher” in Italian. Created as a theater arts character in the 1600s, he’s a short man of mischief. He wears face paint and a black Spanish dress with a cape. He’s an arrogant showman with a guitar who lives to manipulate the crowd.
Since Scaramouche leans evil, it seems he’s more a demon here. He’s the greeter/ entertainer in the underworld. “I see a little silhouetto of a man,” the main character tells us. Then, Freddie Mercury changes his role to the omniscient, Godlike narrator who sings, “Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?”
The Fandango dance has origins in Spain that trace back to the 17th century. I am not a professional dance reviewer, but the Fandango features a lot of elegant yet silly twirls and poses.
So, when the narrator faces his judgment in the afterlife, Scaramouche is there to mock the man’s passage into Death with his kooky harlequin boogie. Brutal. This turn of events suggests that the young man’s life and demise was a cruel joke. The young man was betrayed by his lover, whom he killed, then he cried to his mom, presumably died, and now this guitar-toting nutjob in KISS-type makeup is dunking on him with a TikTok video.
To make matters worse, it’s a stormy night in the underworld. “Thunderbolt and lightning, very very frightening for me.”
In the lyrics, this brings us to Galileo and Figaro. Born in Pisa, of Leaning Tower fame, in 1564, Galileo was a seminal astronomer and physicist. He’s known as the Father of observational astronomy and the scientific method. He took the telescope to the next level, built an early version of the microscope, and rightly disputed the Catholic Church’s claim that the Earth and not the Sun was at the center of the galaxy. When it comes to science, Galileo is in the GOAT conversation.
What about Figaro? He’s the male lead in a Mozart opera, The Marriage of Figaro. In which, the sleazy Count Almaviva tries to get with his servant Susana, but instead she falls for Figaro, the charming underdog and her fellow servant. The young couple gets married, leaving the Count with blue balls.
Quote: “Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, Figaro/ Magnifico!” These two appear together. The narrator is happy to see the pair. The brilliant and brave Galileo and the bold and charming Figaro may be his heroes. They advocate for his soul: “He’s just a poor boy from a poor family/ Spare him his life from this monstrosity.”
Suddenly, it’s clear that we’re experiencing a court case between heaven and hell. The narrator pleads, “Easy come, easy go, will you let me go?”
A voice answers “Bismillah! We will not let you go!” In Arabic, “Bismillah” means “in the name of God.” Well, that sounds official. Bummer.
And so the verdict is in. They won’t let him go. Our protagonist comes to the harrowing conclusion that “Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me.” Holy gulp.
Beelzebub, a mythical creature if I ever looked one up, is a God, according to the Philistines, but also, according to the Christian Bible, he’s the prince of demons. He was practically the VP to Satan. In this context, since we’ve established that this is a scene from the underworld with high production values, Beelzebub is a demon. (So he sounds like a jerk to me.)
We exit the zany mock-opera and enter into glorious ‘70s metal thrashing in minute four. To recap, this section expresses the poor boy’s raging revenge. From about 4:09 to minute five, Brian May rips on guitar. Roger Taylor and John Deacon in the rhythm section crush it too, but May’s performance here is so magnifico.
(Side note about Brian May: He’s a Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famer who is also a Doctor of Science with a degree in Astrophysics. His thesis was titled “A survey of radial velocities in the zodiacal dust cloud.” … Why do I have to be dumber than most of the people I write about?)
I have beautiful, vivid memories of being a kid and watching Wayne’s World on VHS. Early in the movie, Wayne, Garth and their pals go for a cruise around Aurora, Illinois in the Murphmobile. Wayne plays a Queen tape. Minutes later, when Brian May puts on that superhero cape, the boys start to headbang, overcome with joy and youthful energy. And as I sat on the couch excitedly in the Olig family living room, I was headbanging too. This was likely the first time I rocked out to hard rock music, while enjoying a comedy classic of the ‘90s.
And that might be the biggest reason I wasn’t lying when I said this song was my favorite. That was a lot more fun than the deep analysis I’m doing now.
Speaking of that analysis, I did crack a smile, albeit without headbanging, when I realized this story is told out of order, like Tarantino films such as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. All the puzzle pieces are there, most in life, some in death, but they’ve been jumbled. On the timeline of events, the homicide metal part happens first. After the fact, the poor boy reflects on what he’s done. We go back to the very beginning, where he wonders, “Is this this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality.” He copes with the pain with nihilism, saying “Nothing really matters to me.”
Next, he finds his mom and confesses. The poor boy mourns, “Life had just begun, but now I’ve gone and thrown it all away.” He then hints at going into hiding, knowing that he’s wanted by the law. “If I’m not back again this time tomorrow, carry on, carry on/ As if nothing really matters.” He’s asking her to cope with the pain through nihilism too.
But as far as avoiding capture goes, the fugitive soon concludes it’s too late. His time has come. We don’t get the details on how the poor boy leaves this world, but he tells us: “I don’t want to die. I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all.” And we have to wait a few minutes, for his last words, “Nothing really matters, anyone can see. Nothing really matters to me.”
The poor boy’s life ends, and then his soul, too, meets its demise in the opera, with Beelzebub putting a devil aside for him.
Now, I’m still not reinstating Queen as my GOAT song monarch, but all the other personal favorites I’ve mentioned would be hard-pressed to reveal so much with some detective work. “BR” is emotional in nature and intellectual if one seeks that, with stunning musicality, dynamics, cinematic-like storytelling, and production.
When I called it a unicorn, that was true, but it’s also (sort of) the cause for our divorce. Because I’ve heard it so many times, it’s a work of genius that has become a no-brainer. When I first became aware of “BR” while watching Wayne’s World, it was a straight-up magic spell. Decades later, when I was exposed to the unicorn five times a day on the radio and once at Kwik Trip, the magic was lost. Queen’s masterpiece was a fantasy brought to life, only to be commodified and overexposed.
With so many things possible in our imaginations, we ended up with a tired unicorn on display at a common zoo, sponsored by Cumulus Media. What have they done to our unicorn?
Looking for solace, I’m not the type who can shrug it off and say, “Welp, nothing really matters.” I’ve tried nihilism. It just made it so I couldn’t get out of bed.
Some things do matter to me. The wind can blow in any direction. And I’m a little bummed out that it had to blow this way.
