Bo Rap 'queer' analysis by Shela Whiteley

queenUSA wrote: Guess what everybody?  Her analysis just won a Nobel Prize!   

No - just poking fun.  She lost me long before she went down the lane of "phallic drums" ?????????
But seriously ....why do people feel compelled to take this on to the point of becoming extremely academic and clinical about it and writing their dissertations on it?   All this "hang wringing and gnashing of teeth"over (gasp!) THE meaning of the song (at Freddie's expense). It's repellant in a way - just enjoy it.  

Why oh why can't it just be a simple explanation, a simple story?  After all, Freddie wanted to make a key feature of it an Opera section ... so what is Opera? Well, it's tragedy - that's Opera in a nut shell. Heck, the whole album was named A Night at the Opera ... so how about this .... an only son commits a terrible crime, disappoints his immigrant parents - feels real remorse, but it's too late and almost gets stoned to death.  Tragedy? Check.

I think "analysts" have to be watchful and honest with themselves that perhaps they have "pre-formed" their conclusion (the "coming out" song) and then arranged any available evidence laying about to support that conclusion until it seems convincing. I hope most people can see through these contrived attempts.  I say let's gather up all the analysis papers and have a shredding party! Let us take back Bohemian Rhapsody on behalf of Freddie and true fans who care about Queen and their legacy past, present and future. 

Phallic drums???? ===========================================================================

I agree with you -- a bit. The amount of crappy academic writing I've come across would make you weep.  However, there's a simple rule to life that it's best to follow -- thinking is better than non-thinking, and even a failed attempt at analysis or interpretation (if that's what this is) is better than not thinking about it at all. You've lost me though with your comment "Let us take back Bohemian Rhapsody on behalf of Freddie and true fans who care about Queen and their legacy past, present and future." I've no idea what that means.

What it means is that I grow weary, annoyed and frustrated when I try to enjoy listening to the song for what it is and someone invariably pops up and says "oh isn't that the song that really means that Freddie is .... X, Y, Z?"  Why do I have to address that?  I don't want to go there - not just for Freddie, but also for Brian, Roger and John.  It's their private lives, their private worlds. I respect that it's sacred to them and does not need to be dissected by me, by anyone.  Most comments on you tube videos and performances are positive but you can always depend on "those" voices, like clockwork , to pop up and bring on the sexuality thing again and again.  And then the defending begins and you see the back & forth and the ugliness of it all. Perhaps it would be fascinating to write about that behavior instead.

queenUSA wrote: What it means is that I grow weary, annoyed and frustrated when I try to enjoy listening to the song for what it is and someone invariably pops up and says "oh isn't that the song that really means that Freddie is .... X, Y, Z?"  Why do I have to address that?  I don't want to go there - not just for Freddie, but also for Brian, Roger and John.  It's their private lives, their private worlds. I respect that it's sacred to them and does not need to be dissected by me, by anyone.  Most comments on you tube videos and performances are positive but you can always depend on "those" voices, like clockwork , to pop up and bring on the sexuality thing again and again.  And then the defending begins and you see the back & forth and the ugliness of it all. Perhaps it would be fascinating to write about that behavior instead.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is your view of "what it is" the only one you ever want to hear?

It's not their private words and lives, since they published them all, for the world to see, in a very successful song.

YouTube is full of morons. What do you expect from a pig but a grunt. However, there is nothing insulting about the analysis I posted. It's the author's views, some of which are interesting (Mary Austin being mama) and some a bit of a stretch (phallic drums).

As Roger once stated '...well, i think it's pretty obvious what the song is about.'

(does that help? :p)

Another search for deeper meaning where's no deeper meaning.

I heard that one critic claims that David Lynch's masterpiece "Blue Velvet" is about the Oedipus complex. But someone's subjective (and wrong) view can't change my own opinion because I can think too.

As well as "Blue Velvet" isn't about Oedipus complex, "Bohemian Rhapsody" ain't about coming out. This is about what you can hear in lyrics, about young killer who will die soon. No need in all these mad interpretations!

Some call "Blue Velvet" a masterpiece, some (Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert) despise it.

I'm not saying one is right and one is wrong, just that opinions vary and as always we should each make up our own mind. My thoughts on "Rhapsody" are expressed above. It means something to each of us, but we'll never know what (if anything) it meant to Freddie.

I'm drawn to Queen for the music. When I say for "what it is" I mean ... music. Not lectures, studies, lab results, etc ...  I offered a simple meaning as an alternative to make a point that there are other views out there ... lots of views, and given a half hour I could probably generate a few more meanings that the song could be - but why? I'm not the genius - Freddie and the band are.  
I did not say private words, I said private lives and private WORLDS.  They give us their music and their performances, but when they go home at night and close the door and draw the blinds that's it.  There is a physical boundary to be respected, but what about a psychological one?  That cannot really work can it?  The mind will think what it will and go where it wants ... and in this case it wandered into the twilight zone that is "phallic drums."

There is something unique to Bohemian Rhapsody that predictably provokes just these kinds of expressions of folly or moral disquiet and entreaties for personal privacy that rarely if ever come up with other songs, even when they are understood or theorized to be autobiographical.  They are expressed and perhaps even felt as general principles, but I'm not at all sure. We don't have seem to have this angst about turning songs like 'Love of My Life' or 'Too Much Love Will Kill You' upside down and shaking them out for meaning.  We speak about the personal elements of those and the cast of characters so casually that it doesn't even rise to 'analysis'. Certainly we've debated meanings of any number of other songs without perceiving a moral crisis or fool's errand.

Freddie once said that all his songs were about love.   We know for sure he wrote or delivered autobiographically at times: Love of My Life, It's a Hard Life, for example, or most poignantly These are the Days of Our Lives and The Show Must Go On.  There are almost certainly others.  If we can probe Mother Love for his private feelings about his impending death, which we have - without batting an eye -  when there is little that can be as personal as that, it seems Bo Rhap should not provoke such a strong response, and yet it always does.  Though sex might be implicit in songs like TMLWKY, they are primarily received as songs about heterosexual love, which we have no problem gazing upon. I think the opposite is true with Bo Rhap.  Any contemplation about an autobiographical meaning is seen to be some form of prurient pursuit of his "gay sexual feelings" and that is just such an injustice to an artist and a man who wrote about love so prolifically and at varying times so beautifully, so joyfully, so hopefully, or with pain and regret. If  the song was indeed about coming out or accepting his orientation it was about stepping into a whole life, not just a sex life, and it's a whole life that deserves the same easy comprehension we give Brian or Roger or anybody else.

I remember someone I spoke with was CONVINCED it was about Freddie coming to terms with having AIDS. (No, I'm not kidding)

His translation for "Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now I'm dead" was

He blew a dude (gun against head) and because the guy came (pulled trigger) he got AIDS (Now I'm dead)

Nevermind that we wrote it some 10 years before he contracted HIV/AIDS....

Just for the hell of it this weekend I googled "phallic backbeat" and such to see if it was an actual thing.  Funnily enough, while there weren't a ton of hits the term, there were a few pages of references on "phallic beat" and "phallocentric rhythm" and "phallic drums" and such.  One reference said "something called a phallic backbeat", so maybe it's not totally as silly as it seems initially, and something not uncommon for people examining music in this way.

hmmmm, that gives me an idea ... maybe Sheila and Roger should have a conversation about it.

^ Abstruse post of the month. :)

hi y'all, gonna jump in for my 1st post.
am pretty much in agreement about sheila's essay is thought-provoking but ultimately annoys. Bo Rhap wouldn't be the cultural phenomenon it is, if it's strictly of "gay identity in the mid-70s" - even if it sounds sensible.

back up a sec sheila, this is a band who worked under the ethos of a guy who called himself "musical prostitute", all the way from his performance of "big spender" (a groaty voiced old whore in kimono, picked up as he went around the world "whoring") to spelling out the band's manifesto in "let me entertain you". why would Bo Rhap's significance be a political protest or statement for his troubled identity ALONE (except to academia who must speak up for those without a voice, digging up what mainstream history ignores etc), rather than the other way around:

that gay, straight, rabbit or rabbi, personal experiences are poured into the great "equalizer" of commercially released music, effectively making it neither straight nor gay (check how Bo Rhap's consumed, viral-copied by public in all subsequent forms), just monies in their pockets (& more)?

that's a "crass" proposition academics like sheila wouldn't take. i mean, she has every right to piece together fragments and people's names in his life, match them to sections of Bo Rhap and make a coherent argument of it (though the bit about "spit in my eye" makes no sense in her sticking to the mary scenario.) stretch this logic to its limits, and the seams come apart: why's musical structure more important than actual performance of the song - which, however you personally define camp, should mark out the different tone of emotions in opera section relative to rest of the song. so what does throwing this monkey wrench of "camp" in middle of a supposedly earnest revelation of personal trauma in torturous existence of gay man in mid-70s, affect the overall "statement" about being gay? she thinks having a camp section is musical subversion in itself challenging "straight rock", but why wouldn't this change of tone in narrative shift to a third person omniscient viewpoint, which makes unstable the idea that Fred used music as personal venting/catharsis, more than a confluence of experience and artistic whim to tell a MF-ing good story, a musical experience (told not just by gay and straights, but working musicians who made products at behest of john reid?)

more stretching of her logic: do we then assume, that brian's solo matching fred's tone and emotional pitch, even pushing it toward a crescendo, has something to do with him as stepping aside from mary so she'd get on with fred, and meanwhile watches as sympathetic bystander how their affair unfolded? if she sticks to the strictly author-biographical thrust, why's "mama" strictly about mary rather than some composite of jer and mary, since he came out to her but not fam (plus homophobic family are as likely to "spit in eye" of the gay son as jilted woman?) - "effectively" making mary some surrogate mom thus adding past unresolved drama on top of a breakup that would otherwise be less luridly dramatic as if he had less emotional baggage going in? is R/F/B harmonizing about straight bandmates roped into supporting gay cause (and does roger hitting the highest notes "represent" his ambivalence about being prettier than the actual gay, yet is spared the same emotional turmoil)? see this "biography" can go anywhere!

so i echo queenUSA's idea of reclaiming Bo Rhap, when it comes to what scholars could be doing - better! if you approach Queen from the common critical assumption as a straight band led by a gay man, altogether made lots of flashy, noisy fluff without much meaning or "true" feeling, then of course you try to justify writing about their cultural prominence (as result of commercial success) in a song like Bo Rhap, by giving it a "respectable" reading of "statement by an oppressed minority's real life experience". this ironically perpetuates the continual dismissal of the band as nothing more than noise & business machine.

- what about the context of their career (opera to distinguish from led zep/et al comparisons) & band dynamics that brought about Bo Rhap? (the need to get out of debt, move on up in status of the band, the intra-brand competition in songwriting)

- what about actually respecting the author - beyond digging into his personal life - and look at how related themes and musical motifs (MOTBQ, MFK - all laid out in queensongs.info) evolved through various phases until the overriding artistic idea/obsession of the author moved toward a "final summation" or draft? e.g. living with guilt and the pressure and eventual disavowal of pretending, from ITLOTG...Revisted, to the giant overhaul of The Great Pretender?

-if it's "70s gay identity/experience" she wants, why overlook GOFLB - or does it just not fit that "tortured gay at junction of his life", because she started off with the thorpe case (which is relevant but degrees removed from the rock/showbiz world where sexuality can be a game of performance - meaning, Bo Rhap isn't necessarily devoid of "statement" she deems, but is so subsumed into idea of "performance". fred even claims to move in "theater world", where we know traditionally the public came to tolerate whatever "queenies" hiding in there, as long as they're skilled to act/entertain!)

-more pertinent info from author's biography, that's not gay-related yet which informs his work: he willed Bo Rhap to be "fucking huge", which means he ain't speaking to the converted like carl bean's disco anthem "i was born this way". speaking on band squabbles over Hot Space, he claimed to be "just a songwriter, not songwriter of heavy metal" or some such. this is repeated attempt to decline being packed into any single camp, which, if Bo Rhap's intended to be some authentic gay statement unleashed on the masses as Sheila deems it, would make his method of delivery entirely self-defeating.

And proof is in the pudding: all later viral-appropriations, focus on the lurid emotions in the song undergoing phases of tonal, attitudinal changes - be it parody (bad news), mock-identification with narrator as underdog (wrongfully?) persecuted (comic relief, lee evans?), or simply as musical-emotional-narrative structure to pump their own characters through (muppets).

all of them have one thing in common though, and it's not about feeling sorry or getting the fight on for gays. it's the pleasurable satisfaction of dramatic role-play. who was it that said it's about them playing a role?...