100 Favorite Queen Songs

100 FAVORITE QUEEN SONGS

Rounding out "The Big Four" bands for me, (all of whom have had previous such lists on my blog already), it's time for my inevitable ranking of my one hundred favorite Queen songs in the order I see fit.  Along with The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Kiss, Queen has remained the most seminal part of my musical appreciation since I was around twelve-years old, if not younger.  They are one of the four bands in the world that if anyone were to tell me were the best of all time, I'd give them no argument whatsoever.

I have to blame/give credit to my brother for planting the seed that made me the Queen fan that I will remain for the rest of my life.  At the time of Freddie Mercury's passing, Wayne's World making "Bohemian Rhapsody" very popular and relevant again, and A Concert for Life airing live on television, my brother was in 3rd grade and for whatever mystical reason decided that this was the greatest band that ever existed.  Living in the same house with him, it was unavoidable that I was gonna be exposed to Queen as much as he was and though I didn't latch onto them quite as fanatically as his ten-year old brain did, my fate as a fan was assuredly sealed.  Furthermore, it only blossomed from there.

They had us at "Mama".

What Queen had as a collective unit was what I'd consider to be the ideal situation for any band, even more so than The Beatles.  Every last member of Queen was a crucial part to their success both artistically and commercially.  They all wrote enormously popular singles, so not only their hit-making talent but also their individual royalties were more evenly dispersed than most bands.  Three of the four members were gifted vocalists; Freddie Mercury the most obvious, but Roger Taylor's comically high octave range and powerfully grainy lead and Brian May's warm, lower register each could've solely fronted their own bands with zero difficulty.

Taylor and May also have two of the most unique, identifiable playing techniques and sounds in all of rock music on their respected instruments.  May's homemade guitar tone has stayed consistent and still can't accurately be duplicated.  Plus his chops and guitar orchestration wizardry put him light years beyond what most axe-slingers ever even considered achieving, let alone did.  And by simply accenting his hi-hat with nearly every snare back beat and hitting his drums harder than a Hulk erection, Roger Taylor stands out exclusively amongst his peers.

And here he is presumably catching a glimpse of an actual, fully erect Hulk.

I've given John Deacon some singular praise on this blog already.  As competent of a bass player as he was, arguably more important still was his increasingly confident songwriting skills that garnished Queen with some of their most well known songs, ("Another One Bites the Dust", "You're My Best Friend", "I Want to Break Free").  By their last few records, Deacon was contributing song ideas as much as May or Mercury was and after quietly retiring from the music industry altogether by the late 90s, he's solidified himself in some respects as the band's mysterious, unsung hero and secret weapon.

Now talking about Queen and not going into great minutia about Freddie Mercury is nigh unthinkable.  He's easily the greatest rock vocalist who's ever lived.  Literally an operatic range, his explosive, effortlessly emotive voice remained unparalleled up until the final few months in his life.  And his showmanship and ability to work a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people and captivate them in the palm of his hand is equally still unsurpassed.  As a writer, he was not only the most prolific out of anyone else in Queen, but also scored the highest number of hit songs that have remained in the masses consciousness ever since.

Oh how we love thee Mr. Mercury.  Here, have some flowers.

Not only then did all of the individual abilities of the band members unite to make their sound what it was, but it was also paramount how truly adventurous and limitless their creativity was.  Beginning as a hard rock band with an emphasis on having a densely layered sound already, (both vocally and musically), they very quickly opted to utilize the recording studio to it's fullest possible potential.  And taking their cue from the Beatles, the rule book was completely thrown out as to what styles of song a hard rock band could record.  Everything from old-timey vaudeville, tin-pan alley jingles, to opera, to soul, to keyboard heavy dance music, to R&B, to bombastic, riff heavy early metal, to lush ballads, to straight-up pop music, it was all game.  And with the band having the sound that they did, regardless of the genre they partook of, it always sounded exactly like Queen.

Active for a mere two decades and Freddie gone for far longer at this writing, the legacy of Queen remains set in stone.  And I find that their repertoire is near-faultless.  Really the only Queen songs I never listen to are the ones that I've been burnt out on due to radio saturation.  "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions" certainly aren't bad songs in other words.  But elsewhere, (from the string of heralded 70s albums, to the messy, un-Queen like Hot Space, to their soundtrack albums, to the posthumously generated Made In Heaven), regardless of the writer, regardless of the popularity, regardless of the occasionally dated 80s synth and drum machine sounds, I enjoy their body of work in it's entirety.  So here's the choicest song gems among them all...