every person can feel freddieās presence in their souls when they sing MAMAAAAAA UUHHHH, I DONT WANNA DIE, I SOMETIMES I WISH IāVE NEVER BEEN BORN AT ALL with all the air in their lungs iām not joking
itās fucking crazy to think about the amount of people who have sung bohemian rhapsody? like itās such a unifying song, by nature of the fact that so many people know it. it holds so many good memories for me and other people. itās a song you scream in the car with your friends while you drive around your boring hometown, itās a song you drunkenly sing with your arm around your best friend, or a song you sing along to with strangers when itās on in public. itās bittersweet to think about freddieās legacy carrying on like that through his masterpiece. freddie carries on because heās a part of so many peopleās good memories and bohemian rhapsody is a huge part of that.
Reblog if you have sung bohemian rhapsody with your friends
every time i see this post iām reminded of the video of 65,000 people singing bohemian rhapsody in near-perfect harmony
like, what other song can make that claim?
Some of the highlights of that video include:
The crowd cheering after the first stanza when they realize what theyāre all doing
So many people audibly ādoing the guitar partsāā¦ like ya do
The sheer number of voices joining the rediculous falsetto (thanks, Roger)
How they all start jumping at the ramp-up āso you think you can stomp meā
Hands up, hundreds, thousands deep for the final āoooooās and the last line to close the song
Only days before my state went into lockdown, āBohemian Rhapsodyā came on in the restaurant kitchen Iād just been hired at and, no shit, every single worker in that little diner started singing along. Me (the only queer afaik), the manager, all the other kitchen workers, the dishwasher up front, the two people on the counter, all but two of the men over 30. Just belting out Freddie Mercury at the top of their lungs. And you can bet when āsometimes I wish Iād never been born at allā came around, we every single one of us ramped up the intensity and basically made sure Freddie could hear us in the afterlife.
One of the things that struck me, listening to the video, is that you cannot distinguish the original vocals from the crowd, and sometimes you can barely hear the music. And the POV is on the stage the speakers are playing the song from!
Thereās good reason why, nearly fifty years after the height of their career, Queen is still considered one of the best bands of all time ever.
(And how albums left lying about in cars will eventually metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.)
Something else thatās rather incredible about this is, Bohemian Rhapsody is a very difficult song from a technical standpoint. Likeāhumor me, okay, go flip it on and try to sing the whole thing at the top of your voice without falling off-key, out of breath, or cracking at least once. Then come back.
Okay. Youāre back? Welcome back. Unless youāre a trained singer, you probably canāt do it. There are too many long notes, too many key changes, and too many places whereāif youāre singing all the partsāyouāre just up and down the scale too damned fast. Iām saying this as a trained singer and I canāt do it. I always crack on āmagnificoā and āleave me to die,ā and I have a pretty decent range, but I know I sound ugly as hell on that final coda.
Okay. Now that weāve established that, I want to talk a little about singing as a chorus. One of the things a lot of people learned during the pandemic is how hard it is to take twenty people, all in different places, and stitch them together to make a single coherent song with perfect pitch and timing. Youāre all practicing on slightly your own tempo, slightly your own key, even if youāre all working from the same base track. (You can see this in a lot of the Wellerman compilations from Tiktok, where someone always says āSoonā a moment before everyone else on āsoon may the Wellerman come.ā) When you have a chorus comprised of many smaller choruses that are all traveling to be together, this is what dress rehearsal is forāto get all of you onto the same tempo so youāre starting and finishing at exactly the same time. This is a thing that normally only happens after at least several days of practice, and it is an important skill that must be taught. Youāre not just born knowing how to do this.
I do not know how many people at that Green Day concert were trained singers. But I do know there is no way in hell all few thousand of them were a single groupāthey showed up a few at a time, maybe even flying solo for the night. Now go and listen to the video again. Listen to the ends of verses and the pickups. Theyāre fucking crisp as hell. Everyone is starting and ending at the same place. Not even a single note off. (And yes, you can hear when itās a single note off, even in a crowd that big. A handful of people would be enough to throw it off.) And while a few in the crowd may be off-key, so many more are on-key that the cumulative effect is of the song being on-key. This isnāt even the band theyāre there to see.
They donāt just know this song, this technically-difficult song, this long and complex song by a completely different band. They know it perfectly. They know it down to the fucking note. They know it so well that they did it in perfect synchrony, without a single chance to practice.
Do you know how insane that is?
