Sunday, April 29, 2012

Classic Albums: A Night at the Opera


Freddie Mercury had the greatest voice in rock history. Freddie wrote the Bohemian Rhapsody, which is probably the greatest song in rock history. Freddie was arguably one of the greatest frontmen in rock history. With this in mind, I'd venture to say that Freddie Mercury was the greatest musician to ever live.

When I was watching him play piano in this documentary it almost brought a tear to my eye knowing that someone of this caliber was taken away from us prematurely. Someone who affected so many people. It's a tragedy of epic proportions that didn't really sink home at the time. But now, in hindsight with a bit more maturity I can see the tragedy for what it was.

I'm not even the biggest Queen fan by a long shot. But you'd have to be blind not to recognize the band for their genius. The cool thing about this little doc is it let's you understand how Queen worked a bit better. They were always a super eclectic band, but I didn't realize that each member wrote their own songs and had creative control of those songs. So it wasn't like a typical band where there's one main song-writer or in many cases where it's a very collaborative process. It was more like each of the 4 members brought forth their own independent songs and the band agreed to collectively play them. Almost like 4 solo artists who band together so they can play live. I'm over-simplying it, but you can see that's why Queen was so eclectic. I can't believe I'm going to compare Queen to DarkThrone, but that's how they work, too. Each dude writes a song and it gets recorded as-is, so their albums sound pretty eclectic as a result.

Like in all of these Classic Albums doc's, the coolest part is hearing the Producer remix the songs. You get to hear the amazing vocal harmonies that Queen would put down. Evidently Freddie had a ridiculously uncanny way of being able to repeat his lines pitch-perfect time after time after time in the studio.

Queen > the Beatles.



No comments:

Post a Comment