Some songwriters like to write songs with very direct messages. Others like to write songs with ambiguous messages. Lastly, some just like to throw words onto a melody that mean absolutely nothing. When it comes to Freddie Mercury‘s magnum opus, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, we’d probably put him in tier two, as he did have a direction. But the song’s underlying meaning has never been robustly defined (even by him, as he once revealed that he doesn’t even know the meaning of the iconic single).
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Queen‘s 1975 song “Bohemian Rhapsody” is undeniably the most well-known rock opera of all time. It’s a six-minute epic with booming crescendos, major key and tonal changes, as well as words that don’t quite coexist with each other in a defined way. However, that seemed to be Freddie Mercury’s intention. He didn’t want to shove his thoughts down listeners’ throats. Rather, he wanted to create a loose lyrical vision that invited interpretation. Hence, he too doesn’t even know what the song is about.
The Opaque Meaning in Freddie Mercury & Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”
As we fans do, we like to speculate, and we’ve come up with loads of hypotheses about the meaning of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Many have speculated that the song is about Mercury’s sexuality or his family’s forced exit from their home in Zanzibar during the 1964 revolution. Like most theories of this nature, there is little validity behind them. That becomes more evident when you read what Freddie Mercury had to say about the song.
Regarding the song’s meaning, Mercury stated in Freddie Mercury: A Life in His Own Words, “I think people should just listen to it, think about it, and then decide for themselves what it means to them. I don’t like to explain what I was thinking when I wrote a song. I prefer people to put their own interpretation upon it – to read into it whatever they like.”
He concluded, “‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is a good one, but I still cannot understand it.” So, there you have it. Are your theories debunked, or do you still think there is more to the song than Mercury let on? There is no way to know, but maybe it’s best to just listen to Mercury on this one.
Stop over-intellectualizing and theorizing, and just let the words move through you. Let them paint a picture in your head, not the other way around.
Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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