Bohemian Rhapsody

[TripleCrown9]

Re: Bohemian Rhapsody

It also isn't real fair to assume someone hasn't/isn't/didn't live life to the fullest just because it doesn't meet your standards.

Freddie Mercury 1000% lived life to the fullest.

[daflyboys]

Re: Bohemian Rhapsody

Well, "living life to the fullest" is a highly subjective phrase as well. Moving right along .....

[Armor and Sword]

Bohemian Rhapsody

We saw the film last night......and it was a highly entertaining movie. I was a mild Queen fan and it was nice to learn more of the back story behind the band.

I always knew Freddy was gay.....even when I was a young 10 years old. It was pretty obvious. Did not matter. Because back then in 1980.....it was taboo. He was a brilliant artist and brought joy to all he touched with his soul. And his soul was on full display with the music of Queen. As a band they lost me in the mid and late 80’s although the soundtracks to Flash and Highlander were pretty ****ing awesome. I just did not like the new direction they took with a few albums. Oh also the tune they wrote for Iron Eagle was fantastic (One Vision).

I remember watching Live Aid and distinctly remember Queen stealing the entire show. And it was not even close. They punched a giant hole in the sky that day.

[JayhawkerStL]

Re: Bohemian Rhapsody

Well, "living life to the fullest" is a highly subjective phrase as well. Moving right along .....

Yeah, move along. You came in to take issue with someone having the audacity to respect Mercury in a thread about a film that celebrated his life. Not surprised you lack the empathy required to understand how Mercury overcame his demons to find real love and a better perspective on life, even as he had to face his own mortality.

AIDS was a different beast in the 80’s. It was not only a death sentence, it was used by large swaths of society to condem “those people” as conservatives chose to ignore the gay disease until it became so massive it affected everyone.

And somehow, Mercury gets shamed for his lifestyle, while rock culture has celebrated heterosexual promiscuity as a right of passage. I appreciate Mercury for his part in changing the norms in western culture to be more inclusive. I’m not going to shame his memory because he doesn’t live up to anyone else’s standards.

[DJ]

Re: Bohemian Rhapsody

We saw the film last night......and it was a highly entertaining movie. I was a mild Queen fan and it was nice to learn more of the back story behind the band.

I always knew Freddy was gay.....even when I was a young 10 years old. It was pretty obvious. Did not matter. Because back then in 1980.....it was taboo. He was a brilliant artist and brought joy to all he touched with his soul. And his soul was on full display with the music of Queen. As a band they lost me in the mid and late 80’s although the soundtracks to Flash and Highlander were pretty ****ing awesome. I just did not like the new direction they took with a few albums. Oh also the tune they wrote for Iron Eagle was fantastic (One Vision).

I remember watching Live Aid and distinctly remember Queen stealing the entire show. And it was not even close. They punched a giant hole in the sky that day.

A&S, the 80's were an interesting time for Queen. A big shift in musical style. I like the pop-influenced work for the most part, mostly because John Deacon's bass work was stellar, but there's some definite weak tracks, and you were hard-pressed to say that from the first 5-6 albums.

Innuendo, the last album released before Mercury's death, may be the band's best effort. Queen went back to its 70's roots on this one and Mercury's vocal performance really shines. There's a great story behind "The Show Must Go On" where Brian wasn't sure Freddie was up to signing the song and Mercury grabbed the mic, knocked back a drink and delivered a chilling performance in ONE TAKE. You want to feel something in music? Listen to that song while you process how a man months from death faced it head on and knocked the song out of the park.

[roadman]

Re: Bohemian Rhapsody

You can't say one "lived life to the fullest" for someone that engaged in tragedy and cut their life short. The thing is with these entertainers and artists is that we think we know them and what they've been through because we watch their movies, shows or listen to their music continually and can feel like we're a part of their world. We're not. I mean look at Anthony Bourdain. Everyone thought he had it all going on and was in complete control because of how he acted and presented. Clearly, he wasn't. Living life to the fullest won't involve making such risky moves where your life is so affected or, at worst, terminated, concurrently affecting others in the process. That's just narcissistic and unfortunately sad.

Whoa, hold on a minute, living life to his fullest was a direct quote from Brian May, the lead guitarist of Queen. I would think he would know Freddie Mercury better than you and I and everyone in between.

In a documentary of Queen, Queen's former manager said he cautioned Freddie about his lifestyle and the risk involved in the late 70's and Freddie's response was, I don't care, I'm going blank anyone I feel like.

In celebrity death postings, don't always assume that the one hitting the keyboard has an emotional attachment to said celebrity. It's not subjective if the statement is coming from Brian May unless you are calling him out as a liar.

In this case, there were two strong voices from Freddies past that said these things. Brian May also stated that during Freddie's last months of working on the last album, you could tell he was tired and weak, but he never complained once about how tired and weak he was.

Documentary below at the correct start time is video proof of Brian May stating Freddie lived his life to the fullest.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CoM0vd4cWiY?start=4517" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[Armor and Sword]

Re: Bohemian Rhapsody

A&S, the 80's were an interesting time for Queen. A big shift in musical style. I like the pop-influenced work for the most part, mostly because John Deacon's bass work was stellar, but there's some definite weak tracks, and you were hard-pressed to say that from the first 5-6 albums.

Innuendo, the last album released before Mercury's death, may be the band's best effort. Queen went back to its 70's roots on this one and Mercury's vocal performance really shines. There's a great story behind "The Show Must Go On" where Brian wasn't sure Freddie was up to signing the song and Mercury grabbed the mic, knocked back a drink and delivered a chilling performance in ONE TAKE. You want to feel something in music? Listen to that song while you process how a man months from death faced it head on and knocked the song out of the park.

I will check that album out. I actually purchased every Queen album through The Miracle and never picked up their last album before Freddy’s death. And I liked some of the stuff off The Miracle.

But yeah their stuff from the 70’s....was epic. And they are one of the few bands I regret never seeing live. I have been to well over 100 live shows in my life thus far....Queen was one that got away from me.

[bigfnjoe96]

Re: Bohemian Rhapsody

Today is the anniversary of Freddie's death. The wife and I saw the movie today. We really enjoyed it.

The opening lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody hold so much meaning and are so powerful. Couldn't help but shed a tear when he disclosed his AIDS diagnosis to the band, and the message, "with the time I have left, I want to best Freddie Mercury I can be".

Freddie your music will live in the hearts of many. Thank you for having the courage to be yourself. The world is a better place cause of it...freddie-mercury-3.jpeg

Sent from my PH-1 using Tapatalk

[JayhawkerStL]

Re: Bohemian Rhapsody

Read this story and thought of this thread. It goes toward what I mentioned before about how differently we viewed AIDS and homosexuality in the 80's, and how that manifested itself in gay culture. I think Ruth's story is important to hear, and I think this fits here. I think Mercury would have appreciated this woman.

The Woman Who Cared for Hundreds of Abandoned Gay Men Dying of AIDS

Between 1984 and the mid-1990s, before better HIV drugs effectively rendered her obsolete, Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She buried more than three dozen of them herself, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.

It started in 1984, in a hospital hallway. Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother when she went to University Hospital in Little Rock, Ark., to help care for a friend who had cancer. Her friend eventually went through five surgeries, Burks said, so she spent a lot of time that year parked in hospitals. That’s where she was the day she noticed the door, one with “a big, red bag” over it. It was a patient’s room. “I would watch the nurses draw straws to see who would go in and check on him. It’d be: ‘Best two out of three,’ and then they’d say, ‘Can we draw again?’ ”

She knew what it probably was, even though it was early enough in the epidemic for the disease to be called GRID — gay-related immune deficiency — instead of AIDS. She had a gay cousin in Hawaii and had asked him about the stories of a gay plague after seeing a report on the news. He’d told her, “That’s just the leather guys in San Francisco. It’s not us. Don’t worry.” Still, in her concern for him, she’d read everything she could find about the disease over the previous months, hoping he was right.

Whether because of curiosity or — as she believes today — some higher power moving her, Burks eventually disregarded the warnings on the red door and snuck into the room. In the bed was a skeletal young man, wasted away to less than 100 pounds. He told her he wanted to see his mother before he died.

“I walked out and [the nurses] said, ‘You didn’t go in that room, did you?’” Burks recalled.
“I said, ‘Well, yeah. He wants his mother.' They laughed. They said, ‘Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming.’”

Unwilling to take no for an answer, Burks wrangled a number for the young man’s mother out of one of the nurses, then called. She was able to speak for only a moment before the woman on the line hung up on her.

“I called her back,” Burks said. “I said, ‘If you hang up on me again, I will put your son’s obituary in your hometown newspaper and I will list his cause of death.’ Then I had her attention.”

Her son was a sinner, the woman told Burks. She didn’t know what was wrong with him and didn’t care. She wouldn’t come, as he was already dead to her as far as she was concerned. She said she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died. It was a curse Burks would hear again and again over the next decade: sure judgment and yawning hellfire, abandonment on a platter of scripture. Burks estimates she worked with more than 1,000 people dying of AIDS over the years. Of those, she said, only a handful of families didn’t turn their backs on their loved ones.

Burks hung up the phone, trying to decide what she should tell the dying man. “I went back in his room,” she said, “and when I walked in, he said, ‘Oh, momma. I knew you’d come,’ and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, ‘I’m here, honey. I’m here.’”
Burks pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him, and held his hand.

She bathed his face with a cloth and told him she was there. “I stayed with him for 13 hours while he took his last breaths on Earth,” she said.

Since at least the late 1880s, Burks’s kin have been buried in Files Cemetery, a half-acre of red dirt on top of a hill in Hot Springs, Ark. When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’s uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter, “Someday, all of this is going to be yours."

“I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,” she said.
“Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?”

Files Cemetery is where Burks buried the ashes of the man she’d seen die, after a second call to his mother confirmed she wanted nothing to do with him, even in death. “No one wanted him,” she said, “and I told him in those long 13 hours that I would take him to my beautiful little cemetery, where my daddy and grandparents were buried, and they would watch out over him.”

Burks had to contract with a funeral home in Pine Bluff, some 70 miles away, for the cremation. It was the closest funeral home she could find that would even touch the body. She paid for the cremation out of her savings.

The ashes were returned to her in a cardboard box. She went to a friend at Dryden Pottery in Hot Springs, who gave her a chipped cookie jar for an urn. Then she went to Files Cemetery and used a pair of posthole diggers to excavate a hole in the middle of her father’s grave.

“I knew that Daddy would love that about me,” she said, “and I knew that I would be able to find him if I ever needed to find him.” She put the urn in the hole and covered it over. She prayed over the grave, and it was done.

Over the next few years, as she became one of the go-to people in the state when it came to caring for those dying with AIDS, Burks would bury more than 40 people in chipped cookie jars in Files Cemetery. Most of them were gay men whose families would not even claim their ashes.

Her story continues at the site where this was posted.

[MaximilianIV]

Re: Bohemian Rhapsody

The film is great
But I wanted so badly the film ended with The Show Must Go On story. It was their last song and the voice was recorded with the only one attempt. It'd be much more dramatic and sadder
But still cool