Queen

I freely admit that I am kind of a dick, in that I am diametrically opposed to “new Star Wars“. I admit that freely and without provocation.

I used to drink when I went bowling. I still drink, I just no longer mix it with ninepins. I am a sore loser and a mean drunk. Eventually I’ll smack the sweeper in the neighboring lane with a ten-pound ball, and they make me leave. I like to scoot around on the red carpeting in my borrowed shoes, too. On a league night, the skills I bring to the lanes are comparable to a fistful of rock salt. Know this: my appearance in any bowling alley augurs grimly for everyone on premises.

There was a brief period when a man named Robert Van Winkle clung to a bad fib.

This happened before software existed that detected duplicate audio waves. Van Winkle became Vanilla Ice in his teens, at a point in music where accountability wasn’t only unnecessary, it was unverifiable. This clown could talk all the shit he wanted, without debate. Prior to the internet, poseurs got along fine for a while before being found out. Plus unlike MC Hammer, Van Winkle saved his money, so he could retreat to a mansion whenever humiliated.

But like “Puff Daddy”, Vanilla Ice was one of those dumb, sample-centric rappers that just can’t understand when they’ve disgraced someone else’s work. They lack the depth to grasp that they’re willfully hijacking emotions that aren’t their own. How the fuck could Vanilla Ice get away with circumcising the finest Queen song of all time, and then claim to drum his own original beat with the foreskin? Did he honestly think everyone was so stupid, that they couldn’t see he was a lying plagiarist?

If you listen to this masterpiece, and all you can think of is cutting it up into pieces, all I can say is, how dare you? HOW DARE YOU?

Just picture that stupid whigger asshole starting the song over and over, bobbing up and down like a gibbering ape, acting like he’s uncovered the secret key to hip-hop kismet. And who needs the sensitive, beautiful vocalizations of Freddie Mercury and David Bowie, when you can listen to this brain-dead baggy-pants douche bark and hoot about how “cool” he is? I don’t know why you’d need a chorus you could learn and grow from, like “Under Pressure”; a bunch of dolts bellowing “ICE ICE BABY” works just as good.

This is what made the 1990s suck. Vanilla Ice was the pace car for sucking, on an oval track of shit. I don’t know which was worse; the inexplicable popularity of Vanilla Ice, or the years of resentment from black people who think he was accepted by whites as a “vanilla” substitute for rap. I’ve only known one person in my life who professed to like Vanilla Ice; my roommate in the dorm, in 1990. I had filled out a questionnaire asking what I didn’t want in a roommate, and since my knowledge of rap at that time extended to Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, I wrote “NO RAP MUSIC” in huge block letters. The dickwipes at SCAD placed me with the polar opposite of myself. He also enjoyed “Hammertime”.

Queen was probably the greatest rock band of all time. The lead singer, Freddie Mercury, was a tenor with a four-octave range. He was dying of AIDS when a predatory simp named after a dessert decided to turn his music into a joke, so he couldn’t put up much of a fight. This is one instance where lawyers are beneficial; without them, rappers with more ambition than ideas could pillage any song they chose. The stuff that does get sampled is bad enough.

Here’s another gleaming Queen nugget that’s still fresh as a daisy:

You can put that next to “harmony” in the encyclopedia. I never understood why the average dude turns his nose up at opera; if you love Queen, you like opera. It’s just got guitars, that’s all. But Freddie Mercury’s pacing, delivery and range were definitively operatic. He was such a fully-formed and blazing superstar, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you he was actually Farrokh Bulsara of Zanzibar. He was a lusty gay man in a group called “Queen”, and nobody got rankled about it. The cat was just too beautiful for this world.

So be thankful and reverent of what we’ve got. I think it’s unfortunate that when I go into an audio store, the clerk is usually testing the speakers with some thudding post-rap autotuna. Yeah, that’s how you demonstrate lows and highs- with aural sludge. Back in MY day, there was only one sure-fire method to sell a set of speakers. You may know it as “Another One Bites The Dust”.

Playing that song on a decent stereo system would sell a customer the system, the speakers, and the album to boot. I would offer this to alien civilizations as the highest apex of Earth music. I’ve never encountered a person who dislikes “Another One Bites The Dust”; if I did, I would be wary of them, as I would a poisonous reptile. Why music continued in any form after the release of this song, I have no clue. That’s a piano with the sustain pedal down, played backwards under the bass line at the start; only geniuses conjure magic like that. There was only one man in history who could sing those vocals, and he died with the name Freddie Mercury.

That may be why none of us associated “Queen” with “drag”; it was more a matter of who their music was fit for.

[Postscript: Being that I was traumatized by numerous album covers as a toddler, including Queen’s A Night At The Opera, I found the Family Guy episode where Stewie Griffin was traumatized by the News Of The World cover to be hysterical.]

https://youtu.be/9V_CvrkSnaQ