The Real Wizard wrote:
Michael Allred wrote:
Jim Beach was thinking long term.
All the ways Queen kept themselves in the public consciousness that fans HATED (reality shows and competitions, commercials, movies, the musical, compilation albums) allowed the band to survive all these years and the movie finally put them over the top.
The tours with Rodgers and now Lambert have helped cement the whole thing.
I credit Jim Beach.
Bingo.
They are everywhere in popular culture now. Countless kids are devouring the back catalog now - not just the greatest hits albums.
QPL played the long game for the last 20 years, and it has finally paid off.
I think you're seeing a long-term strategy that was never really there - you can connect the dots after the fact, but I seriously doubt that, say, the 5ive-collaboration was meant as anything more long-term than "we might get a hit this year". Now, with Queen being on top, it might all look like a grand, long-term plan coming to fruition, but I find it much more likely that the examples cited were all intended to have short-term benefits, and the fortuitous long-term outcome that happened to occur many years later was simply a matter of luck.
This kind of thing occurs in historiography all the time, and we have a word for it: "teleology", the idea that phenomena arise because of the purpose they serve, rather than arising from underlying, possibly less visible, causes.
For anything that is happening in the present, you can draw a continuous string of events, causes if you will, leading up to it, but it would be a mistake to assume that all those events could only have led to the present outcome, or were even meant to produce that outcome. It's easy, perhaps even natural, to look at history that way, but it is deceptive.
