The voice, yes. The voice that could range the octaves with the ease of a slide rule, to soothe or seduce or harrow. But also the form that flung that voice across the stadium, that gave a physique and a trajectory to its passion. Freddie Mercury, who died nineteen years ago today, was a symphony as well as its conductor.
His voice, stunningly, was untrained, but his sense of theatricality was tuned in English boarding school. He was well aware of the need, on any organized stage, for blocking — the pattern of movement around the performance space that brings actors into vital stances and postures. Hamlet crosses to the apron to declaim his elegy for Yorick’s skull. Mrs. Tyrone descends the stairs to enact her lapse into addiction and madness. The singer arrives at a pre-set pose to hammer his high note into the bleacher seats.
(Digression: Have you ever looked at the lyrics to this song? They’re dire … if it’s an anthem, it’s one of oppression and surrender.)
Mercury understood the frontman’s role is presentation. He is the focal point that lets his fellow musicians do their best work in the shadows. Even guitar gods like Brian May benefit from this arrangement. Without Mercury, May’s notes and lyrics might never have lifted off the staves to go forth and rock, and certainly cassette tapes left in one’s car longer than a fortnight would not automatically metamorphose into The Best of Queen. For twenty years Mercury was Queen in a sense, from the band’s name to its brand logo to its bracing stage show. (The fact that May for a time thought he might recapture that lightning with Paul Rodgers speaks of an ear that’s turned to tin from too much money.)
Seeking to arrest the grand audience, the operatic performer sculpts the air, using his body as punctuation to the passions he seeks to to impart. Freddie Mercury had his own lexicon. The outstretched fist, a pose of heroic strength and assertion. The reaching hand, gesturing a lover closer. The clasping of his sternum, to salve his own heart. The fist overhead. The legs akimbo. The fullest possible silhouette, always presented to stage front.
I’m going to be accused of radical tastelessness for this, I know it — but let’s hold Godwin’s Law in abeyance for a second and look at another passionate communicator who often held stadiums in thrall:
The message is far different. The medium is the man.
Farrokh “Freddie” Bulsara, the Indian colonial subject from Zanzibar who conquered Anglo rock, probably had a knighthood in his future, maybe even before Ian McKellan and Elton John broke the queer barrier. Had he lived, we wouldn’t have been subject to moralistic I-told-you-so’s from the likes of relentless traditionalist Phil Collins. Had he never been born, we might never have seen the poetry of rock in motion.
Ask just about anyone to name the biggest Asian rock star of all time, and I doubt they’ll get the answer right. The fact Freddie was Indian—and that so much of Queen’s bombastic theatricality likely stemmed from that influence (think Bollywood)—is almost always overlooked by rock critics. However, a good number of those critics do single out his Live Aid show as possibly the greatest rock performance in history.
Did Mercury ever acknowledge or play up his heritage, though? He was pretty press-shy and I get the impression he would’ve rather had us believe he sprung from the head of Zeus.
“The fact that May for a time thought he might recapture that lightning with Paul Rodgers speaks of an ear that’s turned to tin from too much money.”
Bullshit, and spoken like someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.