Queen

[poliphilo]

Music is the most insidious of the arts. The one that burrows deepest, the one it's hardest to shake. If I hate a painting I can forget about it; it doesn't insist on wallpapering my inner world. I'm not obliged to constantly replay the plots of bad novels. Pickled sharks and poems by Ted Hughes don't go round and round in my head the way Bohemian Rhapsody does if it first gets a grip. I like Queen about as much as I like Hirst and Hughes (which is to say not much) but I carry their collected hits around with me, like a box of runny gelignite, ready to be touched off at the slightest jolt. "Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, Figaro."

I was watching a documentary about them last night. Every time one of their songs struck up my brain did a little squeal and started singing along. Brain, I hate you!

I have a certain regard for Freddie. Offstage, as filmed interviews made plain, he was a sweet, mousy little guy with a Simpson's overbite. You wanted to take him home to your mum and have her knit him a sweater. How did that wholly unremarkable person become the priapic rock god of our dreams? Oh the transfiguring, Dionysiac power of art. 

Comments

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I think your brain is trying to tell you something.

"Bohemian Rhapsody", is fun but overwrought and vastly overplayed. I liked, "Fat Bottomed Girls", myself. Part of it may be generational. Technically, you and I are both boomers but rock for me begins with the guitar bands of the 70s.

There are worse "ear worms". My wife the school teacher got, "Too Drunk to Fuck", stuck in her head, last week, and found herself walking down the hallway, at work, absently singing to herself.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, they wrote some jolly songs. That's the problem: they're so damnably hummable. I like my music less ingratiating.

I don't believe I know "Too drunk to fuck". I guess I'm lucky.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Luck is somewhat relative. "Too Drunk To Fuck", began life as an obnoxious, if catchy, little number by the American punk group the Dead Kennedys. What lodged itself in my beloved's brain, though, was a much more palatable cover by Nouvelle Vague.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

While I'm at it, and lest you judge the group by a single cut: Nouvelle Vague's, "In A Manner of Speaking".

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the links. I'll have a listen....

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

If you like that sort of thing, we've grown quite fond of Nouvelle Vague and thus my wife's difficulty.