Queen‘s fourth record, A Night at the Opera, was a go-for-broke rock moment, the most expensive album ever recorded at the time, a theatrical sojourn in the name of rock and unconventional pop. Silver-throated Freddie Mercury and the rest of their fab four-esque creative songwriting force pulled it off, topping UK charts for four non-consecutive weeks surrounding the Christmas of 1975. Though it certainly wasn’t perfect. “Seaside Rendezvous” and “Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon” are pretty kooky, “Piggies” throwaways. And Roger Taylor’s slick homage to the “feel” for his “automobile,” “I’m in Love with My Car,” didn’t really supersede its cheese-factor across the bends of time. But its collective twelve songs do fit an over-the-top baroque concept no one has really been able to oust since. Chiefly because no one will write a ballad so uniquely diverse and genius, “Galileo” quirks and all, as “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The defining moment of the record, Broadway wish it could rock as hard as Queen, Mercury opening the near-6:00 opus with a now age-old entertainment decry:
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
