Post-Royal-Wedding commentaries ... in graphics ... and videos

Who did the Queen look like?

An anti-monarchy statement:

My favorite Queen?  Really? You have to ask?



Or, how about the Dancing Queen?

Freddie Mercury movie soon. Queen rocks!

In an earlier post, I commented that a movie based on Freddie Mercury's life will be fantastic--not only because of the music by Queen, but also because of the so many fascinating contextual backdrops of his life.

Apparently it is the beginning to the end that waiting game.  BBC reports that a team has been assembled to start filming next year:

Ali G and Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen is to play Freddie Mercury in a film about Queen, the rock band's guitarist Brian May has confirmed to the BBC. ...
Frost/Nixon scribe Peter Morgan is writing the screenplay, he added.
The film, which will focus on the period leading up to Live Aid in 1985, will begin shooting next year.

Cool.

Homophobia caused Queen's demise in the US ...

I wondered earlier on why there wasn't as much an interest for, and excitement in, Queen here in the US.  My only hypothesis was that somehow the life and lifestyle of the singer--Freddie Mercury--was not received well, particularly during the virulent anti-gay days of the 1970s and 1980s, which was when Queen was soaring high.

I wonder no more.

Unfortunately that was the case.  And this was from the metaphorical horse's mouth--from Brian May, make it Dr. Brian May, who was the co-founder of the group and their lead guitarist.

May was a guest in Terry Gross' "Fresh Air", and her question to him was about the rather incongruity between most of the band's fans who in those years were not quite supportive of homosexuals.  May suggested that even though the world was aware of Mercury being gay, it was something like an unspoken topic amongst his fans.  He put it so well:

"I think it was an undiscussed thing for a long time. The truth of the matter is nobody should care. Why should anyone care what sexual persuasion people have? It's about the music, and Freddie would have been the first to say that. He never hid the fact that he was turned on by men instead of by women, but strange enough, I don't think it was always the case. Because in the early days, we used to share rooms. So in the early days, I know who Freddie slept with, and they weren't men, but I think it gradually changed. And I have no idea how these things work, but it wasn't really anybody's business but his, and we never talked about it as if it were important. Why should it be important? We just made music together."

May went on to say that in the US, it was indeed the gay aspect that resulted in the group touring in America much less than they liked :(  That they were the biggest group everywhere in the world, playing to packed stadiums, except here in the States.

In particular, he referred to the video they made for "I want to break free".

In the video, which is easy to make out that it is a spoof at various levels, the Queen's players dress up as women.  May said that in the promo tour interview in the Midwest, the ashen-faces of the people when they watched the video made it all clear ...

Anyway, apparently after Wayne's World made Bohemian Rhapsody and Queen famous all over again, by when Mercury was already quite ill, Mercury's comment was that he would probably be dead before they got big in America again.  It all makes sense, now, as to why his death did not register as a huge event here in America :(

Brian May is quite a Renaissance Man.  The way he explained the physics of the acoustics of their music making to the physics of inter-stellar dust .... he came across as a wonderful lecturer too.  Dr. May is now the Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University.

The Queen from Zanzibar ... a misleading title, I suppose!

Was thinking about Tanzania earlier.  Thoughts took me to the place where we had lunch--Hasty Tasty.  Halfway through the lunch, my lunch-mate spotted a photograph on the wall of a person who seemed to look not quite European nor Indian nor Middle Eastern, and we became curious.

So, I walked up to the counter and asked the person there.

"You don't recognize him?" was her reply. 

I had no idea, though the face in the photo looked familiar. 

"That is the Aga Khan" she said, and various pieces fit together right away.

See, before we sat down for lunch, when we were walking around, I saw a hospital named after the Aga Khan. 

Now, the curious conversationalist in me took over. It turned out that she (I think the "mum" in that place that travel books refer to) was born in Zanzibar--yes, that island/archipelago which merged with Tanganyika to form the country Tanzania.  Marriage brought her over to the mainland.  Most of her relatives, near and far, have immigrated to the UK or Canada, or the US.

We were on a schedule, and had to get going.  I had hoped to chat with again another time, but when I returned there about ten days later, she was not to be found--perhaps that was her day off.  I was looking forward to resuming the conversation because I wanted to ask her about Freddie Mercury, the lead guy for Queen.

Mercury was born in Zanzibar to Parsi parents.  His schooling was in India, but the entire family had to flee from Zanzibar when the Sultan was thrown out in the aftermath of the British exiting .... So, Mercury ended up in the UK.

Aha, you see how I ended up thinking that somebody ought to make a movie out of Freddie Mercury's life.  It has all the drama that you would ever need--from his childhood in Zanzibar and India, the political uncertainties in the background along with their minority status, then the UK, his HIV/AIDS (which he did not publicly acknowledge for the longest time).... the music scene/Queen, an astrophysicist lead-guitarist!  I tell you, this will be an Oscar-winning movie. 

Here is one of my favorite Queen songs: