Fifty years ago this very day, Queen released Bohemian Rhapsody as a single. By the time it reached record stores it was already familiar to many, having received extensive radio play by the likes of Kenny Everett (“Excuse me while I scrape myself off the ceiling,” was Everett’s reaction after its first spin). So the song climbed the charts quickly. Within a month it had gone to No 1, where it then sat for nine weeks, from the end of November to the end of January. And Bohemian Rhapsody has stayed lodged in pop music’s collective consciousness ever since. It’s a song so instantly familiar that you only need to hear that first multitracked vocal smear of “Is this the real life?” to replay all five minutes and 55 seconds of it in your head. You’re probably doing it right now, in fact.
But how did it get so firmly lodged in the pop canon? After all, and this is hardly an original observation, but Bohemian Rhapsody is a deeply weird mega hit, a song that explodes all the usual rules of success. Everywhere you look there are contradictions. It’s a multimillion seller that has no chorus, numerous tempo and key changes, ambiguous and difficult-to-parse lyrics and a long running time. Musically, with its Gilbert and Sullivan operetta leanings, it has more in common with the 19th century than the 20th, let alone the 21st, but it’s also the most streamed 20th-century song this century, a musical throwback that nevertheless dragged pop into the music-video age. It’s both celebrated as a queer anthem or an extended metaphor for coming out, and is the British armed forces’ favourite song. It’s an extremely silly, borderline novelty hit that is also sort of deeply serious: “If I’m not back again this time tomorrow/ Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters.”
