Queen’s 1975 opus, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” is the defining work of late lead singer Freddie Mercury’s career. Spanning six minutes long with a balladic intro, operatic section, hard-rock part, and piano outro, it inspired an award-winning 2018 biopic of the same name. Decades later, however, there are still debates over the meaning of the A Night at the Opera track.
The most popular theory about “Bohemian Rhapsody” is that it served as Mercury’s way of coming out as gay or bisexual. Mercury biographer Lesley-Ann Jones claims to have confirmed the theory with Mercury’s longtime lover Jim Hutton.
“‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ WAS Freddie’s confessional,” Hutton told Jones. “It was about how different his life could have been, and how much happier he might have been, had he just been able to be himself, the whole of his life.”
In this interpretation, the first verse represents Mercury killing his old image:
Mama, just killed a man
Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead
Mama, life had just begun
But now I’ve gone and thrown it all away
Mama, ooh, didn’t mean to make you cry
If I’m not back again this time tomorrow
Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters
Lyricist Tim Rice, who worked with Mercury on his solo songs including “The Fallen Priest” and “The Golden Boy,” confirmed this theory in an October 2015 interview with The New Zealand Herald:
I’ve spoken to Roger Taylor [the band’s drummer] about it. There is a very clear message in it. This is Freddie admitting that he is gay. In the line ‘Mama, I just killed a man’ he’s killed the old Freddie, his former image. With ‘Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead’ he’s dead, the straight person he was originally. He’s destroyed the man he was trying to be, and now this is him, trying to live with the new Freddie. ‘I see a little silhouetto of a man"—that’s him, still being haunted by what he’s done, and what he is. Every time I hear the song I think of him trying to shake off one Freddie and embracing another—even all these years.
Mercury, on the other hand, vaguely claimed the song was “just about relationships,” with “a bit of nonsense in the middle.” The “nonsense” he was describing is the third verse, which is actually rife with high-brow references:
I see a little silhouetto of a man
Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?
Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightning me
(Galileo) Galileo, (Galileo) Galileo, Galileo Figaro magnifico
A “scaramouche” is a roguish clown character in Italian commedia dell arte plays, while Galileo refers to Italian astronomer, engineer, and physicist Galileo Galilei, who is known as the “father of modern science.” Meanwhile, Figaro is the title character of the 18th century French play The Barber of Seville—and subsequent operas by Mozart, Paisiello, and Rossini.
Later in the verse, Mercury references “bismillah,” which is an Arabic phrase meaning “in the name of God":
Bismillah! No, we will not let you go
(Let him go!) Bismillah! We will not let you go
He closes out the verse by name-dropping Beelzebub, who is the “prince of demons” in the New Testament of The Bible:
Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me!
Regardless of how “Bohemian Rhapsody” is interpreted, the song is often mentioned in the same breath with Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” as one of the most boundary-pushing tracks of the ‘70s prog rock era. Despite taking a major risk with the classical opera section, the track reached No. 1 in several countries and peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1976.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” has also found new life on streaming services, thanks to renewed interest in Queen’s catalog from the aforementioned biopic. In December 2018, Universal Music Group announced that it was the most-streamed song from the 20th century, with 1.6 billion global streams across services such as Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube.
Listen to the song above, and read all the lyrics to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” on Genius now.
