1975: Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody

SATURDAY, December 12, 2020 – 8:02 AM

1975: Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody

Popular for 44 years…

For those of you who want to dig deep into how Bohemian Rhapsody got written, the Wki article is pretty thorough. It’s very long, so if you don’t want to slog through the whole thing, here are a few important points:

  • It was slammed by critics who are, of course, almost always 100% wrong about anything important.
  • Record companies said it would never get played on the radio.
  • Record companies said it was too long.
  • People had the last word, because they immediately loved it, and it has been incredibly famous and popular ever since.
  • For the record, the moment I heard it I was blown away and told everyone to listen to it.

The bottom line

The bottom line is that it has been at the top of the charts or very nearly at the top many times, in many countries and is perhaps the most popular rock song every recorded in the UK.

What Shakespeare would have said if he had been a musician

He would have said: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the critics.” I don’t want to kill anyone, and I’m not suggesting violence or even anger. In addition, there are some very good critics who make important points. However, most critics generally get everything important wrong, again and again, and this has been going on as long as long as we have recorded history.

Rock Critics Really Blew It…

As you can see, they really screwed up – not just a little bit, but all the way. Other musicians understood that something special was happened, but short-sighted people very nearly stopped the song from being presented to the world.

What ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ reviews say about the critics | Opinion

Here is a good, thoughtful article written by someone today about what happened, and why critics so often are in one world while all the rest of us are in another. When something is really bad, second-rate, over time the world’s opinion becomes the same. Even when this or that is extremely popular, even “viral”, it will be gone in a year or 10 years if it does not have special worth. But if it remains popular 50, 100 and 200 years later, you can be assured that it has worth, and then the negative opinions of critics become revealed for what they are, short-sighted and often spiteful.

Queen Fires Back At Critics For Poor Bohemian Rhapsody Reviews

The members of Queen, those still alive, have been very positive about the film Bohemian Rhapsody film. Once again film critics have been extremely negative, citing discrepancies between what really happened historically and certain things in the film that are said to take dramatic license. But as is true with music and other so many other things, a huge number of famous and world-respected books, plays, movies, musical compositions and so on were ridiculed at the time they were created, only to be acknowledged later, even among critics, to be works of genius.

6 thoughts on “1975: Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody”

  1. Something a lot of people don’t really talk about in relation to Bohemian Rhapsody is that one of the reasons Queen was given so much freedom with the single was because of the success of the Sheer Heart Attack album. I don’t see a lot of people talking about the songs on that track but Killer Queen and Sheer Heart Attack are some of my favorite Queen songs in general.

  2. Of course, a true classic. The way this song manages to keep people listening and engaged despite it’s long run time is truly remarkable. It changes tones and genres frequently and manages to make them all connect seamlessly. I love just how wrong critics can be despite claiming themselves to be always right. It can be really funny to see just what they can miss out on.

  3. I have always loved this song, it’s really interesting to find the background of this song, especially that critics disliked it. What I don’t get is how critics are people, and when people heard it they loved it, but for some reason when critics heard it they disliked it which just doesn’t make any sense to me.

  4. It is music I have always liked. A thought reading the “long story” is: when the structure is described, it is what we read about “classical” music, but this is “mere” rock music. No “mere” about it.

  5. There is something about this music that just draws you in.

    “It was slammed by critics who are, of course, almost always 100% wrong about anything important.”

    So true. This video got over 1 billion views on You tube!!!

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