“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen

"Bohemian Rhapsody" led the charge off Queen's A Night at the Opera in 1975, and it's the sound of a rock band flatly refusing to pick a lane. Freddie Mercury wrote it on his own, called it a mock opera, and built it by welding three of his songs into one: a drifting introduction, a piano ballad, an operatic pileup of voices, a hard rock stampede and a quiet, rueful coda.

Mercury sings lead and steers the whole contraption from the piano. Brian May's guitar struts and wails, John Deacon's bass keeps its footing through every lurch, and Roger Taylor, not content with a drum kit, hauls out timpani and a gong, while he and May stack their voices onto Mercury's until three men sound like a packed choir loft. The band produced it with Roy Thomas Baker across five studios that August and September, and the tape machines of the day forced them to bounce parts down through eight generations of 24-track tape, close to 200 tracks of overdubs in all.

The promo film helped push the music video along as a form. It ruled the UK chart for nine weeks, went back on top after Mercury's death in 1991, and Wayne's World handed it to a whole new American audience in 1992. The Grammy Hall of Fame took it in 2004 and the National Recording Registry in 2022, and nothing else on rock radio's countdowns is shaped quite like it.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.