Bohemian Rhapsody genre progressive rock
"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen, released as the lead single from their fourth album, A Night at the Opera (1975). Written by lead singer Freddie Mercury, the song is a six-minute suite, 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. It is one of the few progressive rock songs of the 1970s to achieve widespread commercial success and appeal to a mainstream audience.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!"
Although critical reaction was initially mixed, retrospective reviews have acclaimed "Bohemian Rhapsody" as one of the greatest songs of all time and is often regarded as the band's signature song. The promotional video is credited with furthering the development of the music video medium. It has appeared in numerous polls of the greatest songs in popular music, including a ranking at number 17 on Rolling Stone's list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. A Rolling Stone readers' poll ranked Mercury's vocal performance as the greatest in rock history."Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks (plus another five weeks following Mercury's death in 1991) and remains 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 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. Following the release of the 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century. In 2021, it was certified Diamond in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units.Composition and analysis
"Bohemian Rhapsody" has been affiliated to the genres of progressive rock (sometimes called symphonic rock), hard rock, art rock, and progressive pop. 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.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". Commenting on bohemianism, Judith Peraino said,Legacy
Musical impact
In 1976, when asked for his opinion on "Bohemian Rhapsody", the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson praised the song as "the most competitive thing that's come along in ages" and "a fulfillment and an answer to a teenage prayer—of artistic music". Producer Steve Levine said the track broke "all sonic production barriers" in a fashion similar to the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (1966), Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" (1963), and 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" (1975). Greg Lake, whose song "I Believe in Father Christmas" was kept from number one in the UK by "Bohemian Rhapsody" when it was released in 1975, acknowledged that he was "beaten by one of the greatest records ever made", describing it as "a once-in-a-lifetime recording".Addressing the song's enduring popularity, author and music lecturer Jochen Eisentraut wrote in 2012: "A year before punk made it unfashionable, progressive rock had an astounding success with the theoretically over-length (nearly 6-minute) single 'Bohemian Rhapsody' which bore many of the hallmarks of the 'prog' genre". He said it was "unique at this point to hear a hit single in this style", it was "more accessible than other music of the genre" and was "able to communicate beyond the usual confines of the style". Author and progressive rock historian Stephen Lambe called it a "remarkable" single and said it "provides a neat but coincidental bridge between prog in its prime and the move to more aggressive songwriting", suggesting the song "feels like a grotesque (although probably unintentional) parody of progressive rock". The New Rolling Stone Album Guide described it as "either a prog-rock benchmark or the most convoluted novelty song ever recorded". Writing for the BBC in 2015, the Chicago Tribune's music critic Greg Kot called it a "prog-rock pocket operetta" and said the song's "reign as a work of wigged-out genius rather than a dated gimmick testifies to its go-for-broke attitude—one that has resonated across generations".In 2009, The Guardian's music critic, Tom Service, examined the song's relationship with the traditions of classical music, describing its popularity as "one of the strangest musical phenomena out there":
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