The March Of The Black Queen-- Queen

March Of The Black Queen



So I was hanging out with my son, playing with blocks and whatnot, listening to an old playlist I'd made, when Bohemian Rhapsody came on, and he positively lost his shit when it hit the operatic part. Which is funny, because that's basically the same reaction I had...except for I was 15. So for the past couple of weeks, I've been making my way through the Queen catalog, for the first time in probably close to a decade. Which has been interesting--this is a band that I was obsessed over in my late teens, that, aside from occasionally hearing BR, I haven't listened to at all in recent years.

This track captures, I think, both the highs and the lows of the 21st century Queen experience. From Queen II (1974), it was part of a sprawling, nonsensical album filled with a cast of sexually charged fantasy characters getting into all sorts of fairy trouble, accompanied by a soundtrack of soaring, layered vocals and killer riffs. A year later, they released A Night at The Opera, which really tightened the operatic bits, mixing in a lot more of a traditional rock sound and pop sell-outs (the god-awful You're My Best Friend), becoming their first real commercial success. The album after that opened with We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions, and, aside from a glorious diversion into Flash Gordon, their experimental phase was over and they pretty much made standard pop-rock with modified Queen flair until Mercury died in 1991.

So on one hand, this song is positively ridiculous--which is kind of self-evident. It's over-the-top and out of control, and doesn't make a shred of sense. But at the same time, I really find its brazenness kind of endearing. It's Mercury at his most unapologeticaly gay/femmine ("I'll be your bad boy/I'll be your bad boy/Now do the march of the Black Queen"--only Kevin Barnes would do that nowadays, but he'd make sure everyone noticed), and Queen making a record that didn't cater at all to what rock-stars were supposed to sound like, totally unconcerned with nuance, convention, or self-image. It's not political, it's not deep, it's an almost gleeful exercise in production for production's sake.

Then there's the music itself. It's ridiculously busy, almost schizophrenic, like they had fifteen partially developed hooks and crammed them all into a six-minute opus. It gives the impression of a young band sitting on so many ideas that they just didn't know what to do with them all--which is really refreshing when you listen to bands that seem to take one idea and then torture it until it's long-enough for a complete song. I'm talking to you, post Achtung-Baby, U2. Brian May, who is seriously overlooked by history, throws away a dozen, awesome ten-second riffs in this song--each of which could have had a complete song built around them. Mercury's vocal talents are in full effect here, layered Pet-Sounds style on top of each other because no one else in the band could sing, and, for most of the song, they dive in and out of each other and May's guitar to great effect. You get the feeling that this sounds exactly the way they wanted it to--that for better or worse, there's not a single note out of place. Technically speaking, it's more ambitious and successful than BR, it's just so divorced from any real emotion, and so unrestrained, that it ultimately hurts itself in the end. Still, I think it's Queen at their very best, and you don't have to look to far to see the bands that have tried to duplicate parts of this sound. For example, I think this is what the Decemberists would sound like if they had a vocalist and spent a little less time believing their own hype.