“Making the most-streamed song from the 20th century took ambition, hard work, and a dash of opera,” Rolling Stone
The Bohemian Rhapsody track first played on U.K. radio in October 1975 and squeezed onto a seven-inch single at the end of that month. It has become the most-streamed song from the 20th century, with more than 2.8 billion plays on Spotify alone.
Rolling Stone : The statistic leaves little doubt: Queen’s biggest song is on its way to becoming the rock era’s most lasting artifact, Figaro, Beelzebub, and all. “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a five-minute-and-54-second remnant of a brief slice of time when musicians could afford to spend weeks slathering overdubs onto a single track, when engineers made edits with a razor on magnetic tape, when bands raced to push the limits of song structure and recording technology, and maybe when, as Taylor caustically argues, “you actually had to be good at your instrument — that doesn’t seem to be a necessary requisite these days.” Even as Queen labored over “Rhapsody” and the rest of their fourth album, A Night at the Opera, the clock was ticking. Two weeks before the album’s release, the Sex Pistols played their first show in London.
The uncanny vocal blend that hit its peak on “Rhapsody” was born in echoey caverns on the coasts of England, during frequent visits to Taylor’s native Cornwall. . . . . May, Mercury, and Taylor started to sing in three-part harmony there. “We used to go into the caves and just sing stuff,” May says. “We kind of wallowed in the sound, this beautiful blend of harmonies. Particularly Freddie and I, I suppose, shared that passion.”
“THEY’VE HAD 50 YEARS to ponder it, but May and Taylor still haven’t nailed down what Mercury was singing about on “Bohemian Rhapsody.” “Sadly, we can’t ask Freddie,” Taylor says. The members of Queen never discussed their lyrics with one another, and Mercury was hardly eager to offer explanations. “People still ask me what ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is all about,” he said years later, “and I say I don’t know.” Any revelation, he suggested, “loses the myth and ruins a kind of mystique that people have built up.” His late friend Kenny Everett, the DJ who debuted the song, said Mercury privately went as far as to dismiss the whole thing as “rhyming nonsense.” (RS)