Is this the greatest Rock performance of all time? That's what the internet thinks. I'm impressed by Freddie Mercury's operatics, stage moves and sheer stamina, but on what basis can this be considered "the greatest" vs countless others by Queen and other bands of that era? Is it because the world was watching?
https://youtu.be/A22oy8dFjqc
I think it's a bit like Woodstock...much of it is when, where, who saw it and the indelible impression it left on people. I remember this and I wasn't even there!
ReplyDeleteNYT rock critic Jon Pareles answers thus:
ReplyDeleteWhy was Queen’s performance so revered?
The Live Aid concerts took place at a peak moment for idealism in rock, when top-selling musicians decided they should leverage their popularity for good works, like alleviating famine in Ethiopia. International satellite links drew a worldwide audience to Live Aid and generated tens of millions of dollars in donations. It was half a decade before the World Wide Web existed, and an eon before live-streamed concerts became ubiquitous. An estimated 1.5 billion viewers tuned in.
Queen reveled in the magnitude of the occasion. Bigness — grand pronouncements, operatic dynamics, Mercury’s soaring voice and Brian May’s titanic guitar buildups — was the cornerstone of Queen’s music. “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You,” two signature Queen songs, are triumphalist anthems, built for giant stages and shouted singalongs. Queen’s drummer, Roger Taylor revealed in a 1999 Mojo magazine interview that Queen’s engineer had also tweaked the stadium’s sound-system settings so that, “We were louder than anyone else.”
Running just over its allotted 20 minutes, Queen reached for all of its extremes: the melodramatic piano-ballad opening of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the rockabilly swing (and tongue-in-cheek Elvis Presley impression) of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” the hard-rock chords of “Hammer to Fall,” the drum stomp of “We Will Rock You.”
Mercury held all those aspects together with a performance in which campy and commanding were inseparable. He opened and closed the set sitting at the piano; in between he strutted and preened, carrying his microphone on a metal pole that he treated as a vaudevillian’s cane, an air guitar and, of course, a phallus. He was a rock star playing a rock star, leather-lunged and imperious but also grinning to let everyone share the joke. And in Britain, where Queen had become a symbol of national pride, the Wembley crowd was his from the beginning, roaring back every call-and-response and doing a stadium-wide, hands-held-high double clap in “Radio Ga Ga.” For 21 minutes, Freddie Mercury undeniably made the world his stadium.
nytimes.com - When Queen Took ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to Live Aid