Bohemian Rhapsody Stems

[Kody Baril]

Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen, released as the lead single from their fourth studio album, A Night at the Opera (1975). Written by lead singer Freddie Mercury, the song is a six-minute suite,[4] notable for its lack of a refraining chorus and consisting of several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda.[5] It is one of the few progressive rock songs of the 1970s to have proved accessible to a mainstream audience.[6]

Mercury referred to "Bohemian Rhapsody" as a "mock opera" that resulted from the combination of three songs he had written. It was recorded by Queen and co-producer Roy Thomas Baker at five studios between August and September 1975. Due to recording logistics of the era, the band had to bounce the tracks across eight generations of 24-track tape, meaning that they required nearly 200 tracks for overdubs. The song parodies elements of opera with bombastic choruses, sarcastic recitative, and distorted Italian operatic phrases. Lyrical references include Scaramouche, the fandango, Galileo Galilei, Figaro, and Beelzebub, with cries of "Bismillah!"

"Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks (plus another five weeks following Mercury's death in 1991) and is the UK's third best-selling single of all time. It also topped the charts in countries including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and has sold over six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the song peaked at number nine in 1976, but reached a new peak of number two after appearing in the 1992 film Wayne's World. In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.[12] Following the release of the 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century.[13] In 2021, it was certified diamond in the US for combined digital sales/streams equal to 10 million units, and is one of the best selling songs of all time[broken anchor].

According to Mercury's friend Chris Smith (a keyboard player in Smile), Mercury first started developing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the late 1960s; Mercury used to play parts of songs he was writing at the time on the piano, and one of his pieces, known simply as "The Cowboy Song", contained lyrics that ended up in the completed version produced years later, in 1975, specifically, "Mama ... just killed a man."[15] Producer Roy Thomas Baker, who began working with Queen in 1972, related how Mercury once played the opening ballad section on the piano for him in Mercury's flat:

Guitarist Brian May said the band thought that Mercury's blueprint for the song was "intriguing and original, and worthy of work".[16] According to May, much of Queen's material was written in the studio, but this song "was all in Freddie's mind" before they started.[17]

"Bohemian Rhapsody" was totally insane, but we enjoyed every minute of it. It was basically a joke, but a successful joke. [laughs] We had to record it in three separate units. We did the whole beginning bit, then the whole middle bit and then the whole end. It was complete madness. The middle part started off being just a couple of seconds, but Freddie kept coming in with more "Galileos" and we kept on adding to the opera section, and it just got bigger and bigger. We never stopped laughing ... It started off as a ballad, but the end was heavy.[22]

May, Mercury, and Taylor reportedly sang their vocal parts continually for 10 to 12 hours a day.[17] The entire piece took three weeks to record, and in some sections featured 180 overdubs.[20] In multiple interviews, May recalled how Mercury's vocal overdubs were so exquisitely precise that he would create a natural phasing effect.[23][24]

Since the studios of the time only offered 24-track analogue tape, it was necessary for the three to overdub themselves many times and "bounce" these down to successive sub-mixes. In the end, eighth-generation tapes were used.[19] The various sections of tape containing the desired sub-mixes had to be spliced (cut and assembled in the correct sequence). May recalled placing a tape in front of the light and being able to see through it, as the tape had been used so many times.[25]

A similar story was told in 1977 by Taylor regarding the elaborate overdubs and sub-mixes for "The March of The Black Queen" for the album Queen II. At that time, the band was using 16-track equipment.[26]

Producer Baker recalls that May's solo was done on only one track rather than recording multiple tracks. May stated that he wanted to compose "a little tune that would be a counterpart to the main melody; I didn't just want to play the melody". The guitarist said that his better material stems from this way of working, in which he thought of the tune before playing it: "The fingers tend to be predictable unless being led by the brain."[17] According to Baker,

... the end of the song was much heavier because it was one of the first mixes to be done with automation ... If you really listen to it, the ballad starts off clean, and as the opera section gets louder and louder, the vocals get more and more distorted. You can still hear this on the CD. They are clearly distorted.[22]

In May 2023, an early handwritten draft unearthed from an auction of items that belonged to Mercury, courtesy of his friend Mary Austin, revealed that Mercury originally considered the song to be titled "Mongolian Rhapsody". It was explained that he wrote the title along with the lyrics in 1974 on a page of stationery from defunct airline British Midland Airways, but crossed out the word "Mongolian" in place of "Bohemian".[27]

"Bohemian Rhapsody" has been affiliated to the genres of progressive rock (sometimes called symphonic rock),[6][28][29] hard rock,[30][31] art rock,[32] and progressive pop.[33] The song is highly unusual for a popular single in featuring no chorus, combining disparate musical styles, and containing lyrics which eschew conventional love-based narratives, and instead make allusions to murder and nihilism.[5]

Music scholar Sheila Whiteley suggests that "the title draws strongly on contemporary rock ideology, the individualism of the bohemian artists' world, with rhapsody affirming the romantic ideals of art rock".[34] Commenting on bohemianism, Judith Peraino said,

Mercury intended ... [this song] to be a 'mock opera', something outside the norm of rock songs, and it does follow a certain operatic logic: Choruses of multi-tracked voices alternate with aria-like solos, the emotions are excessive, the plot confusing.[35]

"Bohemian Rhapsody" parodies many different elements of opera by using bombastic choruses, sarcastic recitative, and distorted Italian operatic phrases.[40] An embryonic version of this style had already been used in Mercury's earlier compositions for the band's "My Fairy King" (1973) and "The March of the Black Queen" (1974).

Then the piano intro plays, marking the start of the second verse. As the ballad proceeds into its second verse, the speaker confesses how ashamed he is by his act of murder (as May enters on guitar and mimics the upper range of the piano at 1:50). May imitates a bell tree during the line "sends shivers down my spine", by playing the strings of his guitar on the other side of the bridge. The narrator bids the world goodbye announcing he has "got to go" and prepares to "face the truth" admitting "I don't want to die / I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all". This is where the guitar solo enters.

A rapid series of rhythmic and harmonic changes introduces a pseudo-operatic midsection, which contains the bulk of the elaborate vocal multi-tracking, depicting the narrator's descent into hell. While the underlying pulse of the song is maintained, the dynamics vary greatly from bar to bar, from only Mercury's voice accompanied by a piano to a multi-voice choir supported by drums, bass, piano, and timpani. The choir effect was created by having May, Mercury, and Taylor repeatedly sing their vocal parts, resulting in 180 separate overdubs. These overdubs were then combined into successive submixes. According to Roger Taylor, the voices of May, Mercury, and himself combined created a wide vocal range: "Brian could get down quite low, Freddie had a powerful voice through the middle, and I was good at the high stuff." The band wanted to create "a wall of sound, that starts down and goes all the way up".[17] The band used the bell effect for lyrics "Magnifico" and "let me go". Also, on "let him go", Taylor singing the top section carries his note on further after the rest of the "choir" have stopped singing.

Using the 24-track technology available at the time, the "opera" section took about three weeks to finish.[16] Baker said, "Every time Freddie came up with another Galileo, I would add another piece of tape to the reel."[19] Baker recalls that they kept wearing out the tape, which meant having to do transfers.[16]

The New York Times commented that "the song's most distinct feature is the fatalistic lyrics". Mercury refused to explain his composition other than to say it was about relationships; the band is still protective of the song's secret.[16] Brian May supports suggestions that the song contained veiled references to Mercury's personal traumas. He recalls "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."[42] May, though, says the band had agreed that the core of a lyric was a private issue for the composer.[16] In a BBC Three documentary about the making of "Bohemian Rhapsody", Roger Taylor maintains that the true meaning of the song is "fairly self-explanatory with just a bit of nonsense in the middle".[17]

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 ... "Bohemian Rhapsody" didn't just come out of thin air. I did a bit of research although it was tongue-in-cheek and mock opera. Why not?

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