Freddie Mercury's 65th Birthday

I enjoy the music of Queen, as do many music lovers of past and present. It's very hard not to enjoy Queen's music and their style of performing, because it's just so good. What especially made these performances so special were that they were led by the talented, flashy, and presentable Freddie Mercury. It's pretty hard to fathom that Freddie Mercury would only be sixty-five on the fifth of September, as this upcoming November will mark the 20th anniversary of his tragic death from AIDS. However, while he was alive, he proved to be a talented force to be reckoned with. A talented force that continues to garner fans from across the rock spectrum.

If you haven't heard at least one of Queen's performances, there's a lot you've been missing when it comes to music. I'm almost positive that most people have heard "We Will Rock You" or "We Are The Champions" at least once. These are rock anthems, sports anthems, simple anthems in the world of music that are so good that the fact that they are simple just seems too good to be true. Then, there's "Bohemian Rhapsody," which many can say is the greatest rock song of all time. This song features a ballad, an opera, and a hard rock section all in a song that's nearly six minutes long (five minutes and fifty-five seconds to be exact). It just so happens that the album this song is featured in, "A Night At The Opera," was named for the Marx Brothers 1935 film of the same name. There are also some other simple hits such as "A Crazy Little Thing Called Love," "Somebody To Love," "Another One Bites The Dust," "Radio Ga Ga," "I Want It All," "Fat Bottomed Girls," and along with David Bowie, "Under Pressure."

The performance and video combo from Queen that was the most striking in my mind was his 1991 hit, "Innuendo," which was from Freddie Mercury's final album of the same name. Due to Freddie Mercury's illness and how he was succumbing to AIDS, there was no new footage featured of Freddie Mercury in many of the videos from this album (songs such as "The Show Must Go On" featured clips from past videos). In the videos with new footage, such as "I'm Going Slightly Mad" and "Those Were The Days Of Our Lives," you could see how he was becoming frail and sick. In the case of "Innuendo," this video featured sketches of Queen, as well as classical footage, plasticine footage, animated footage, and some 1984-esque footage. The song features a rock section, a more classical tone, as well an upbeat tone. This was an excellently arranged video with strong lyrics to go along with it. There are animations of clowns and clown-like jesters that may present viewers with Coulrophobia (a fear of clowns) with nightmares, and these are the more serious looking, theater like clowns, not the bubbly circus clowns.

Freddie Mercury will most be remembered for being an excellent performer who had a wide range of knowledge for rock music, classical music, opera, and anything else in between and also how that music should be arranged to make excellent music. Mercury made Queen one of the most successful rock groups in the world and his legacy lives on twenty years after his death and will continue to live on for twenty more years, and the twenty years after that, and then we should simply add more numbers to that. While their was a lot of controversy that surrounded him (especially later in life), he will indeed be known as being at the top of the line with what he did.