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In The Beginning Was The Song: Freddie Mercury's Anti-Dogmatic, Trans-Religious Legacy
In The Beginning Was The Song: Freddie Mercury's Anti-Dogmatic, Trans-Religious Legacy
Oglethorpe University
This year’s conference focuses on the ways in which “ literature and the arts
have always registered the tensions and fractures in society, probed our bonds
paper looks at ways in which poetry, song and spectacle play an instrumental
role in helping communities define and engage with their culture. I will
Freddie Mercury of the British band Queen was born Farrokh Bulsara to Parsi
parents from India living in Zanzibar, today’s Tanzania. From a young age
the main religions in Zanzibar: Christianity and Islam. As a young boy he was
sent to study in India, where he was further exposed to the school’s Catholic
his international experiences informed his music, and he was able to bring
vastly different people together by assuming, for the sake of his art, the
the excesses in their music and lyrics served to communicate new information
and unmoor the audience’s extant value systems, empowering the audiences
sounds like a tall order, I understand: I am not trying to argue that this was
some original master plan of brainwashing the masses. However, when setting
gaps. The group experience of singing along to familiar songs and chants,
Freddie, who was influenced by the figure of Pied Piper from Robert
“sometimes I think that I could be pied piper of hamelin, but I wouldn’t like to
think that people are that stupid… my job is not to teach the audience, my job
To remind those of you who haven’t heard of Pied Piper, he is the character in
German folklore who has the magical power of flawlessly perfecting his flue tunes to
convey a personalized message to the intended audience. In the beginning of the folk
tale he’s a strange hero who comes from far away and offers to rid the town of the rat
infestation in exchange for a fair recompense. After he lures the rats into the river
with his flute, the officials decide not to pay him, so he enchants all the children of
the town into following him into another realm. Freddie seems to understand or
imagine that he does have the power of persuasion on a large scale, and that by
allowed the audiences to consider their engagement with the band as an intimate
remiss if I didn’t note that he was also always insistent that his songs were all in fun
and that his performances were “all kitsch.” This level of self-awareness coupled with
his public refusal to demystify his songs’ meanings because he claimed that there
were none is very much in line with the poetics of excess; the form that other famous
marginalized artists used to break free from the oppression of the dominant’s culture
In gender and poetics of excess, Ford writes that women in particular resisted the
silence imposed upon them by a very narrow cultural definition of women’s identity
and sphere of influence by using poetic excess in their art. This tweaking of
established forms plays on “the existing instability of verbal signification” to make
Britain not only in terms of his ethnic and religious background but also in terms of
his sexual orientation, which made him a misfit in his own family as well. As a gay or
bisexual man, it is no wonder that he would gravitate toward some of the same
and dramatic, but I haven’t chosen that image. I am myself…” and “excess is
part of my nature.. I can shift from one extreme to the other quite easily.” These
excesses make the work more volatile and channel the tension between style and
experiences. Barthes states that excessive meaning in texts “declares its artifice”
and has a “multilayer of meanings which always lets the previous layer
Meaning, 58). We can also situate Freddie within the magical realism and
freedom ... to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world ... [and] offers
the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that
exists, and to enter a completely new order of things" (1968:34). In The Spirit of
Carnival : Magical Realism and the Grotesque, Danow writes that “For Bakhtin, the
end result of this toppling of established values for a brief period of time is clearly
positive; while the means to achieving that result may remain essentially ambiguous,
those means (which is to say, the carnival attitude in its multitudinous manifestations)
I will focus on Queen’s first album that came out in 1973, titled Queen. While all the
band members contributed to the lyrics over the years, the songs I will look at are all
written by Freddie. In Great King Rat Freddie addresses an apparent issue that the
band has been having with their mercenary manager, but he does so in religious
terms, revealing the hypocrisy of self-professed “saints” and encouraging our own
Here he conflates organized religion and its dogma written in the “Bible” with
“Mama”, a matriarchal female figure who typically strives to organize children’s lives
according to established norms. Here he not only gives women the same power as
organized patriarchal religion, but paints them both in equally oppressive tones and
challenges the listeners to rebel and follow their own authentic path.
On that same album he introduces “My Fairy King” a song that takes the first stanza
directly from Robert Browning’s poem Pied Piper of Hamelin. The stanza introduces
us to the Eden-like land in which by Judeo-Christian tradition man and woman lived
in innocence and harmony with nature until the transgressed against God, but the
folklore based poem in fact paints this as the nether-land where the Piper takes the
children of Hamelin after their fathers cheated him out of his payment.
Jesus, who is described as the fairy king. Eventually, at the violence of man, the fairy
king becomes the singer and calls on his “Mother Mercury” to witness his downfall.
The unholy mess of mythical and religious characters merging into one, the singer
whose mother is Mercury, points to Freddie Mercury as the new messiah to a broken
world.
In “Liar” we have a confessional song that reads like a prayer. Freddie is positioning
himself as a sinner who is never able to get the redemption that he seeks within the
framework of a religion and a system that doesn’t recognize his full humanity. Again
he conflates the heavenly Father with the Mama, and he shows us that trying to fit
unsuccessful, because the inauthenticity will necessarily make one a “liar.” This effort
additionally is equated with slavery and death, and there’s a final suggestion to break
free.
We’re moving on to a song titled “Jesus” where we see Jesus being flocked to by
multitudes, with the exception of an old man who is content to witness the event.
What follows is a delightfully bizzare Mad the Swine, where it appears that the
speaker is a child Messiah who’s come to save us all with a message of love, but is
labeled as mad. It seems to refer also to an incident in Matthew’s gospel where Jesus
frees two men from demons by flocking them into a herd of swine, who consequently
go mad and run over the cliff to their doom. The use of familiar references and stories
from an unreliable narrator/singer really opens up new pathways into the exploration
Seven Seas of Rhye is a revolutionary call to establish a new world over by the
speaker who tells us “you are mine I possess you I belong to you forever,” seemingly
redefining power dynamics between masters and subjects. Injustice and corruption
Bohemian Rhapsody brings into the same conversation the figure of a carnivalesque
stock clown character Scaramouche, Galileo, the scientist who famously defied
Christian dogma, Allah, the name for God in Islam, and Beelzebub, Christian Satan,
rock and roll anthem is invoking Allah, championing the life of a Muslim, Mustapha
Ibrahim, and ends with a Muslim parting greeting Salaam alaykum, peace be with
you. This was a hit with the audiences across the globe, crowds sang along to
unintelligible lines in ecstasy at concerts in Europe and the United States. Just
thinking of the political implications of this choice of text in today’s cultural moment
we can see that it’s a revolutionary concept—bridging the gaps across religions by
calling on the audiences to all bear witness together to a new kind of a shared
Mercury stated that he has “built a structure, a kind of musical belief in myself,
and that keeps me going.” He was obviously able to find himself through his
music, and this is a gift that he shared with the world –an opportunity for us all
to freely explore our options and find a place for ourselves that feels authentic.
Mercury was always resistant to interpretation, I quote: “I will say no more than
what any decent poet would tell you if you dared ask him to analyze his work. If
you see it, dears, then its there….. there’s no great big message.”
He was coy and wanted to so to speak hide behind the curtain as the master
orchestrator of a new movement. But he does have a big message; this is what he
said when asked about Live Aid concert to benefit Africa: “I think something as
It’s a message of universal love and peace, and a shared humanity that
audience to explore the ways in which we are united in our humanity across