Lejla Marijam

Lecturer in Core Studies and English Literature

Oglethorpe University

In the Beginning was the Song:

Freddie Mercury’s Anti-Dogmatic, Trans-Religious Legacy

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," Shelley, 1821.

This year’s conference focuses on the ways in which “ literature and the arts

have always registered the tensions and fractures in society, probed our bonds

and allegiances, and explored how we make and un-make communities.” My

paper looks at ways in which poetry, song and spectacle play an instrumental

role in helping communities define and engage with their culture. I will

present Freddie Mercury’s controversial yet wildly popular legacy as a cross-

cultural phenomenon that continues to play an important role in shaping the

modern global community by breaking down the imagined borders between

cultures, religions and traditions.

Freddie Mercury of the British band Queen was born Farrokh Bulsara to Parsi

parents from India living in Zanzibar, today’s Tanzania. From a young age

Mercury was exposed to his parents’ belief system, Zoroastrianism, as well as

the main religions in Zanzibar: Christianity and Islam. As a young boy he was

sent to study in India, where he was further exposed to the school’s Catholic

doctrine as well as other students’ diverse religious backgrounds. Ultimately,

his international experiences informed his music, and he was able to bring
 vastly different people together by assuming, for the sake of his art, the

persona of Mercury—the god of tricksters, mediators and messengers.

The extravagance of the band’s presentation and concert experience as well as

the excesses in their music and lyrics served to communicate new information

and unmoor the audience’s extant value systems, empowering the audiences

to become engaged critical thinkers and authentic human beings. If this

sounds like a tall order, I understand: I am not trying to argue that this was

some original master plan of brainwashing the masses. However, when setting

out to be authentic and original, Queen established a rapport with their

audiences that allowed them to introduce controversial concepts and form

ways of communication across generational, national, religious and other

gaps. The group experience of singing along to familiar songs and chants,

probably under some sort of an intoxicating influence and at the direction of a

charismatic lead singer and showman, creates a trance-like ambiance where

possibilities for transformation seem endless. This concept was familiar to

Freddie, who was influenced by the figure of Pied Piper from Robert

Browning’s poem Pied Piper of Hamelin. In an interview he once said

“sometimes I think that I could be pied piper of hamelin, but I wouldn’t like to

think that people are that stupid… my job is not to teach the audience, my job

is to make music. I don’t want to change their lives overnight…”

To remind those of you who haven’t heard of Pied Piper, he is the character in

German folklore who has the magical power of flawlessly perfecting his flue tunes to
convey a personalized message to the intended audience. In the beginning of the folk

tale he’s a strange hero who comes from far away and offers to rid the town of the rat

infestation in exchange for a fair recompense. After he lures the rats into the river

with his flute, the officials decide not to pay him, so he enchants all the children of

the town into following him into another realm. Freddie seems to understand or

imagine that he does have the power of persuasion on a large scale, and that by

exposing his audiences to his anti-dogmatic convictions he could influence their

everyday life attitudes and behaviors.

The element of self-mockery and earnestness that Freddie in particular embodied

allowed the audiences to consider their engagement with the band as an intimate

experience. Freddie stated in an interview that he has “learned to do those kinds of

things with an air of tongue-in-cheek, where I actually ridicule myself.” I would be

remiss if I didn’t note that he was also always insistent that his songs were all in fun

and that his performances were “all kitsch.” This level of self-awareness coupled with

his public refusal to demystify his songs’ meanings because he claimed that there

were none is very much in line with the poetics of excess; the form that other famous

marginalized artists used to break free from the oppression of the dominant’s culture

hegemony over language and meaning.

In gender and poetics of excess, Ford writes that women in particular resisted the

silence imposed upon them by a very narrow cultural definition of women’s identity

and sphere of influence by using poetic excess in their art. This tweaking of
established forms plays on “the existing instability of verbal signification” to make

language and story “susceptible to continuing revision.” Freddie was a minority in

Britain not only in terms of his ethnic and religious background but also in terms of

his sexual orientation, which made him a misfit in his own family as well. As a gay or

bisexual man, it is no wonder that he would gravitate toward some of the same

gender-related outlets as oppressed female artists. He was authentically driven to

excess: in interviews Freddie stated: “of course I am outrageous, camp, theatrical

and dramatic, but I haven’t chosen that image. I am myself…” and “excess is

part of my nature.. I can shift from one extreme to the other quite easily.” These

excesses make the work more volatile and channel the tension between style and

meaning, convention and transgression into new and liberating thought

experiences. Barthes states that excessive meaning in texts “declares its artifice”

and has a “multilayer of meanings which always lets the previous layer

continue…saying the opposite without giving up the contrary,” (The Third

Meaning, 58). We can also situate Freddie within the magical realism and

Bakhtin’s carnivalesque expression which has the “ability to consecrate inventive

freedom ... to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world ... [and] offers

the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that

exists, and to enter a completely new order of things" (1968:34). In The Spirit of

Carnival : Magical Realism and the Grotesque, Danow writes that “For Bakhtin, the

end result of this toppling of established values for a brief period of time is clearly

positive; while the means to achieving that result may remain essentially ambiguous,
those means (which is to say, the carnival attitude in its multitudinous manifestations)

nevertheless represent an acknowledged reality that provides an inspiration for art. “

Let’s look at the lyrics themselves and the overwhelming interchangeability of

religious symbols that together forms a mutant, humanist web of meaning.

I will focus on Queen’s first album that came out in 1973, titled Queen. While all the

band members contributed to the lyrics over the years, the songs I will look at are all

written by Freddie. In Great King Rat Freddie addresses an apparent issue that the

band has been having with their mercenary manager, but he does so in religious

terms, revealing the hypocrisy of self-professed “saints” and encouraging our own

self-identification as sinners who will eventually come to follow the Lord:

Now listen all you people

Put out the good and keep the bad

Don't believe all you read in the Bible

You sinners get in line

Saints you leave far behind

Very soon you're gonna be his disciple

Don't listen to what mama says

Not a word not a word mama says

Or else you'll find yourself being the rival

The great Lord before He died

 Knelt sinners by his side

And said you're gonna realize tomorrow

Here he conflates organized religion and its dogma written in the “Bible” with

“Mama”, a matriarchal female figure who typically strives to organize children’s lives

according to established norms. Here he not only gives women the same power as

organized patriarchal religion, but paints them both in equally oppressive tones and

challenges the listeners to rebel and follow their own authentic path.

On that same album he introduces “My Fairy King” a song that takes the first stanza

directly from Robert Browning’s poem Pied Piper of Hamelin. The stanza introduces

us to the Eden-like land in which by Judeo-Christian tradition man and woman lived

in innocence and harmony with nature until the transgressed against God, but the

folklore based poem in fact paints this as the nether-land where the Piper takes the

children of Hamelin after their fathers cheated him out of his payment.

We are introduced to Samson, which is a Biblical figure sometimes conflated with

Jesus, who is described as the fairy king. Eventually, at the violence of man, the fairy

king becomes the singer and calls on his “Mother Mercury” to witness his downfall.

The unholy mess of mythical and religious characters merging into one, the singer

whose mother is Mercury, points to Freddie Mercury as the new messiah to a broken

world.

In “Liar” we have a confessional song that reads like a prayer. Freddie is positioning

himself as a sinner who is never able to get the redemption that he seeks within the
framework of a religion and a system that doesn’t recognize his full humanity. Again

he conflates the heavenly Father with the Mama, and he shows us that trying to fit

into the spaces deemed appropriate for self-expression is ultimately always

unsuccessful, because the inauthenticity will necessarily make one a “liar.” This effort

additionally is equated with slavery and death, and there’s a final suggestion to break

free.

We’re moving on to a song titled “Jesus” where we see Jesus being flocked to by

multitudes, with the exception of an old man who is content to witness the event.

What follows is a delightfully bizzare Mad the Swine, where it appears that the

speaker is a child Messiah who’s come to save us all with a message of love, but is

labeled as mad. It seems to refer also to an incident in Matthew’s gospel where Jesus

frees two men from demons by flocking them into a herd of swine, who consequently

go mad and run over the cliff to their doom. The use of familiar references and stories

in an unfamiliar context without the possibility of further explanation or any support

from an unreliable narrator/singer really opens up new pathways into the exploration

of meaning within religious traditions.

Seven Seas of Rhye is a revolutionary call to establish a new world over by the

speaker who tells us “you are mine I possess you I belong to you forever,” seemingly

redefining power dynamics between masters and subjects. Injustice and corruption

are replaced by harmonious coexistence of new believers.

I will touch on two songs from other albums: Bohemian Rhapsody because it’s so

famous and Mustapha because it is so controversial.

Bohemian Rhapsody brings into the same conversation the figure of a carnivalesque

stock clown character Scaramouche, Galileo, the scientist who famously defied

Christian dogma, Allah, the name for God in Islam, and Beelzebub, Christian Satan,

all converging over a “poor boy” trying to overcome adversity.

Mustapha is written in a gibberish compilation of Persian, Arabic and English. This

rock and roll anthem is invoking Allah, championing the life of a Muslim, Mustapha

Ibrahim, and ends with a Muslim parting greeting Salaam alaykum, peace be with

you. This was a hit with the audiences across the globe, crowds sang along to

unintelligible lines in ecstasy at concerts in Europe and the United States. Just

thinking of the political implications of this choice of text in today’s cultural moment

we can see that it’s a revolutionary concept—bridging the gaps across religions by

calling on the audiences to all bear witness together to a new kind of a shared

uplifting quasi-spiritual experience.

Mercury stated that he has “built a structure, a kind of musical belief in myself,

and that keeps me going.” He was obviously able to find himself through his

music, and this is a gift that he shared with the world –an opportunity for us all

to freely explore our options and find a place for ourselves that feels authentic.

Mercury was always resistant to interpretation, I quote: “I will say no more than

what any decent poet would tell you if you dared ask him to analyze his work. If

you see it, dears, then its there….. there’s no great big message.”
He was coy and wanted to so to speak hide behind the curtain as the master

orchestrator of a new movement. But he does have a big message; this is what he

said when asked about Live Aid concert to benefit Africa: “I think something as

large as this should be universal… we shouldn’t be looking at it in terms of us

and them. It should be all of us.”

It’s a message of universal love and peace, and a shared humanity that

transcends religions and other dogmatic identifiers.

In many of his hit songs and performances, Freddie Mercury intertwines

references from cross-cultural religious symbols and myths, allowing the

audience to explore the ways in which we are united in our humanity across

such stale identifiers as gender, race, nation, religion, or sexual orientation. In

allowing fans to participate in the ritual of the rock concert by chanting,

stomping, singing along and repeating powerful lyrics as affirmations, he

created an inclusive and resilient community of ‘misfits’ who reject the

overarching violence of a traditional community’s dominant ‘message.’