From my movie review of Bohemian Rhapsody in Taki’s Magazine:
Homo Superior
by Steve Sailer, November 07, 2018Bohemian Rhapsody is a crowd-pleasing biopic about the life and sadly early death of Queen’s singer Freddie Mercury (1946–1991) that subversively depicts the roots of the AIDS epidemic. Rather than portray Mercury in the now-traditional manner—as a martyr to Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s homophobia—the film instead reflects his straight bandmates’ view of him as a vast talent who was allowed to ruin his health by the debauchery of the Gay Liberation era that never denied him whatever self-indulgence he craved.
Of course, his contemporaries had good reason to treat Mercury as someone special. In the judgment of the Who’s Roger Daltrey, Freddie was the most virtuosic of all rock singers, an extraordinary vocal acrobat. (Personally, I didn’t particularly enjoy his tone, but his skill at vocal ornamentation was unworldly.)
As a live performer, I’d rank him in the top dozen rock-star frontmen I saw in the 1970s and 1980s, but perhaps not quite in the top rank (say, Strummer, Springsteen, Byrne, Bono, Petty, Prince, Jagger, Hynde, and Davies).
Read the whole thing there.
