Why Mr. Bad Guy was a flop?

Yara wrote:

Queen On Ice wrote:











Forgive me, but as a public forum, even as the thread starter, you surely cannot in all seriousness 'declare a thread closed'.











If people feel they want to continue to contibute to a a thread then it is their perogative Yara. That is how it works.











Sometimes threads are brought back from years ago, one or two  recently have been here on QZ. I am not being disrespectful, I am just pointing this out.











If you really insist that you want no more replies in your thread (a concept I find, frankly, a bit strange), then you need to ask the moderating team to lock it.











:)

I feel so humiliated. I expected people to be more sympathetic to my plight.

OK - if a thread is more important to you than a human being, yes!, that`s the issue, so be it.

Go on with the thread and destroy my honor and self-esteem.

(an absent-minded Yara caressing the blade of a sharp knife next to the bosom)

:-)))

:) Ok, I don't know if you were being wholly serious or not about 'closing the topic', but you have said it twice in this thread so far, and humour is very hard to detect in pure text form.



So here is my disclaimer:



If you were joking, fair enough, fairly funny :)



If not, then my previous post stands.



As I said before, I mean no disrespect, you Yara are one of the last posters I would feel a need to 'flame' or get on the back of here - you often make great sense with your posts.

I'm a bit older,  and i remember Queen in the late 70's when rock you and champions was released, though didn't become a proper fan till much later, about 1988.  world wide freddie's death had an impact since made in heaven was their biggest seller.  In the states?....not nearly as much.  Innuendo never became a big hit, and made in heaven didn't sell much at all, but even saying that they were a bit more popular because of Bo rhap, george michael's version of somebody to love cracked the top 40, Ice Ice baby obviously sampled under pressure.  Personally I think american idol has made queen more popular than freddie's death.

Hi all,
    In common with many artists of his generation who had made it, Freddie seemed to become somewhat 'complacent', at least on the Mr. Bad Guy album, and also the end result was bogged down with production that was very much of its time, and which has dated badly. In this respect, the album is reminiscent of such 80s "classics" as Never Let Me Down (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Tonight) by David Bowie, Undercover by the Rolling Stones, anything Elton John produced in the 80s, McCartney's post McCartney II 80s work and so on. Robert Plant's early solo career also sounds really dated now, and, leaving aside the merits of the songs on both albums, I find that Strange Frontier sounds more dated than Fun In Space, say.
     Leaving aside the production, Freddie, at this time, was very much part of the gay club scene, and, as has been pointed out, much of the material on Mr. Bad Guy comes across as his take on the music that he would have listened to in the clubs. This, in and of itself, I have no issue with: after all, what else is a solo album for, in an artistic sense, than to explore new sounds and new areas that wouldn't fit comfortably within the band format? The problem is that one is left with a sense that he was too busy enjoying the club scene itself to apply himself to songwriting as he would have done in the 70s and early 80s, and as he would do again in later years. There are some songs that seemed interesting, but even the best songs seem somehow uninspired and incomplete. Maybe he needed someone to sound ideas off of, as he did within Queen: again, as has been pointed out, even true solo artists benefit when working with someone capable of coming up with ideas/arrangements: look at Bowie and the likes of Mick Ronson, Carlos Alomar, Robert Fripp, Brian Eno and so on. Had he had one principal collaborator on Mr. Bad Guy, and not just some faceless session musicians, the album could have been more focussed.
      While I can see the comparisons between Hot Space and Mr. Bad Guy, I think, for me anyway, that the former hasn't dated as badly, as the songs themselves are, by and large, relatively strong for the genre (be they "disco" songs (not that I hear much true disco on the album) or more typical Queen songs), with little wrong that couldn't have been fixed by taking more time over the arrangements and production: Staying Power, for example, sounds anaemic on the album, but the live version is funky as hell, and sounds a lot closer to what the band seem to have been looking for, namely a marriage between rock and funk-type sounds. On Mr. Bad Guy, too many of the songs are either anonymous Euro-disco, or else, if they do sound more like Queen, they sound almost like a parody of the songs Freddie wrote for the band: that guitar section in Man Made Paradise sounds like Freddie told the session guitarist to try to recreate the solo in Killer Queen, and Love Me Like There's No Tomorrow, while well-written, comes across as somewhat uninspired and flat. A shame, as he showed with the Barcelona album that he could produce interesting music outside of Queen, but maybe it should be viewed as an experiment and a release valve and taken on those terms.

Very nice first post, Harry.  It's refreshing to see someone with a good knowledge base of music outside of Queen... a rare breed here.

"It's refreshing to see someone with a good knowledge base of music outside of Queen... a rare breed here"

Haven't you met skip/jpf yet?