31 years ago, almost without respite and in the same week, the world discovered that Freddie Mercurysinger of What insidehe was HIV positive, he was dying and he had just died.
The shock and modesty for the consequences of a disease that was spreading beyond moralizing stupidity this time fell upon a global figure, in a country where Miguel Abuelo was still crying Federico Moraalso victims of the virus.
Next, we select five moments in the life of one of rock history’s most legendary singers, unique from where you watch and listen from.
1) Thus spoke Bulsara
In his most famous book, Thus spoke Zarathustra – A book for all and nonethe German philosopher Fiedrich Nietzsche uses the so-called prophet as a figurehead for his ideas, also giving the matter a poetic framework.
We don’t want to reduce one of the fundamental works of modern philosophy to a syllogism, but it is It is worth establishing that Zarathustra is also, in turn, a double of Zoroaster, the founder of Mazdaism or, also, of Zoroastrianism..
“All the gods are dead, now we want Superman to live,” reads one of his most quoted climaxes.
death of god Through the mouth of Nietzsche, using as a medium a character who is an allegory of what is considered the “first monotheistic religion” that is remembered is something that, at this point, went interrogates and crosses the life of the child Farrokh Bulsara (Freddie Mercury) born on the island of Zanzibar (now Tanzania) on September 5, 1946.
Son of two Parsees (natives of Gujarat, in Bombay, India) In his family the professed religion was, of course, Zoroastrianism. Fate and destiny, the son of Bomi and Jer Bulsara will develop all the virtue of him according to his excessive will to live, which could be included in the sentence that another Nietzschean will lavish in 1971: “I am only a mortal with the potential of a superman” (quick sandDavid Bowie, 1971).
Ten years after that proclamation, already converted into superstars & supermen, they will together record the worldwide hit under pressurewhere they alternate in singing. “It’s the terror of knowing what the world is about / Watching some good friends yell ‘Let me out'”.
And ten years after releasing it, the occasional duo would be torn between the one who survived (Bowie) and the one who left (Mercury). A few months later, in May 1992, Bowie knelt at Wembley, in the middle of the Freddie tribute concert, to pray the first Lord’s Prayer live from the history of modern music.
Two) Queen IIthe dark side of a peak
There’s one album that’s a lifesaver for all of us who, while we like Queen, live by looking for a fifth leg for the cat. The one who assumes all the costs in the name of his discography, perhaps because his strategic and chronological position also betrays his purity: it is the step before the explosion of A night at the opera), the 1975 landmark that includes classics like Bohemian Rhapsody Y Love of my lifeamong others.
Queen IIit is necessary to refer to him, It has an occult aura and an almost macabre cover, based on a photo by Mick Rock, the famous portraitist who disappeared a few days ago. An apparent portal to a gloomy world, which the sound content will not deny.
And Freddie, it is documented, is the creator of side B (vinyl era, of course), called the “black side”. As a prelude, on “The White Side”, Procession it could be part of the soundtrack of the time A Clockwork Orangewith its brief and haunting echo of Bach.
father to son it is as if the mixture of abbey road (The Beatles) were supercharged in their pomp and circumstance. White Queen (how it started) it’s rock and imperial and One day one day It was the song Cerati chose as the last song to be recorded with Soda Stereo, for the Latin tribute to Queen.
The loser in the endclosing the side is the hippest song on the album: glam rock worthy of Bowie/Mott The Hoople/The Sweet. An exercise in degenerate gender.
The dark side breaks with Battle of the Orcs: The diaspora between hard rock and heavy metal could be defined here. Masterstroke of The Fairy Fellers it revels in unusual dynamics, which has fans justifying it as a Led Zeppelin-Yes-Beatles mix.
never again looks like a pastiche worthy of Serú Girán (praise) e The March of the Black Queen It is a double-sided fashion show: between opera and musical.
Closing, Funny how love is It looks like a tribute to the Beach Boys and Rhye’s Seven Seas a well-extracted compendium of all the flexibility of the band: musicality, power, ambition, mysticism and a pinch of solemnity bordering on the ridiculous. Plus Mercury, impossible.
3) Peaches from Zanzibar
Witnesses say, and those who claim to have been and those who have imagined a place on the site, that the celebration of Queen’s unveiling of the album Jazz in New Orleans (1979) was something rare. The remembered journalist/host/host Juan Alberto Badía revealed (not shamelessly) part of the memory in his autobiography In my life (2012).
“The hardest thing that happened to me – I’ve told it very few times, certainly for a bit of modesty – was attending the presentation that Queen made in New Orleans of their album Jazzin 1979. An orgy, so short. It was the last big rock party. AIDS appears later, and this causes the story to begin to unfold in a different way. The Rolling Stones celebrate during the tour of Some girls and that Queen’s was the last great crazy rock party. And I was not warned…”.
(…) All this element paraded in the hotel lounge. They were constantly throwing you creepy stuff of all kinds., and I felt… isolated. Biting me for not being able to enjoy. The only thing Queen did was ride their bicycles around the room twice; they had no role. The party was the only protagonist of the evening. It was hard to say in the late 70s, so I kept quiet. Where would he tell it from? From a quiet place, from rock and roll?
It was hard for them to believe you, besides, all the things that happened that night. I wouldn’t have believed them either if they’d told me, but We Argentines were very out of place that night. What happened to me also happened to others. Not so much the Brazilians, although even they were shocked by what was happening. Without knowing it, we were attending the last big rock and roll party. Today it seems almost silly; living it in that moment was strong”.
In reverse, It’s hard to understand how the living members of Queen decided to show a ‘guilty of sin’ Freddie in the self-righteous biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). As if they retraced all the radical euphoria of such a topic as Don’t stop me now rightly entered Jazz and which also closes the film, to minimize the vital impulses that led the singer to be what he was, and everything he was.
4) To live is life
In his suicide note, Kurt Cobain documented his emotional chaos as an entity equidistant from the Queen leader’s way of dealing with things. “When I’m backstage and the lights go out and the mad roar of the crowd begins, I don’t cringe like Freddie Mercury did. He loved and enjoyed the adoration of his fans. And that’s something I envy,” he wrote before shooting himself.
Curious: both Queen (1981) and Nirvana (1992) played in Buenos Aires in the same stadium, the Vélez Sársfield. And it may not have been in this city (or any other in the universe) two more antagonistic shows, with the appropriate asterisks.
That of the British was full, triumphant, hyper-fired by the media at a time when the reception of shows of this stature was practically nil. There were three shows in Buenos Aires plus one in Mar del Plata and another in Rosario where everything one could expect from Mercury was performed as if there were a style manual and was applied to perfection.
Instead, the Cobain trio threw all the levers down when they saw first-hand how local audiences mistreated their opening band, their friends Calamity Jane.
What the boy from Seattle tried to offer to the local audience was exemplary, but misunderstood and ahead of its time: sabotage the concert by depriving the audience of the opportunity to hear the success smells like Teen Spirit and behave with total apathy.
For too many people, the perfect rock show is Queen’s twenty minute performance at the Live Aid Festival at Wembley (1985), for repertoire, context, delivery and empathy with the audience. The film Bohemian Rhapsody he took the saying so seriously that he devoted himself to replicating it in its entirety, as a reconstruction of the highest level one can aspire to achieve on stage.
5) If the singer is silent
In that extraordinary film that it is Silence is a falling body (Agustina Comedi, 2017) the director goes in search of the “lost years” of her parents, who died suddenly a few years ago.
In the reconstruction he encounters revelations: leftist political activism and the homosexual preference of his relationships. “A part of him died when you were born”, is the phrase that an old friend of Jaime’s, that’s what his father is called, pronounces to him without anesthesia.
But Jaime is gone and all he manages to discover is in the films and testimonies of that past, such as gospels that are not apocryphal. But from these testimonies, she herself can come to better understand a fact that once marked her: the first time he saw his father cry.
This happened one morning in late 1991 as I was walking her to school. Crying, inconsolable, Agustina wants to know what happened to her. And Jaime apologizes: the world just learned of Freddie Mercury’s death.
With that excuse, he would discover many years later, she was the main reason for his grief, which was none other than the death of Néstor, his great lover, best man at the wedding and best friend ever since. AIDS had taken them both, and suffering was never less foreign.
IS
Source: Clarin
