He was born Faroukh Bulsara on September 5, 1946 in Zanzibar and became Freddie Mercury, the bright shining star, one of the most fascinating vocalists pop/rock ever had. The flamboyant frontman of the band Queen was an artist as well as his own artwork, the musical prostitute as well as the (un)crowned king of the masses. Intelligent and sophisticated, he could conduct the moloch of music business like the toreador the bull.
This page is a tribute to Freddie Mercury with no words when no words can
mediate what I want to say and what I do feel. Unfortunately, a few words must
be made in this erratic absurdicum called the web and so I'll do my best. Don't
let them stand in the way, though, they're not important and they do mean
nothing...
Best to do is not even read them... this page is meant to be ARTWORK and not
babbles..
Whenever I bought a Queen album my first thought was 'Okay, Freddie, what's in it for me?' Even the first one - in my case it was 'Queen II' - already showed the pattern that would continue up to 'Innuendo': There were some songs I loved so madly that they became my alltime favorites and others I didn't like and never really listened to. I wouldn't even recognize them were it not for Freddie's outstanding voice and perhaps Brian's guitar. Okay, I probably would recognize a Queen song anyway...
Freddie Mercury made a lot of pop music that wasn't meant for me but what I
always loved about him was the honesty in which he did that. He made no false
claims about being a pop star and doing pop music and whatever he did he did it
with style. In my teens I was fascinated with a lot of stars which fabricated
illustrous images of themselfes that I found soooo cool - and that disintegrated
into scatters once I grew to be a few years older to look behind the shallow facade.
That never was the case with Freddie Mercury. He always was a true gentleman.
Funny that almost all the songs I loved were the less popular while the
socalled hits usually passed me by. There were famous exceptions, of course..
'Killer Queen' was one, the 'Bohemian Rhapsody' of course, almost all of the
'Night at the opera', and in the end it was 'Innuendo' where practically each
and every song was 'for me'.
The variety of the albums was astounding.
"I go out to work on monday morning, Tuesday I go off to honeymoon...
I'll be back again before it's time for sunnydown, I'll be lazing on a sunday
afternoon..." *sing*
err.. okay... back to the subject.. Freddie Mercury... what was I to say???
Oh, by the way - this site makes excessive use of javascript, in fact, you
cannot even watch it without having javascript enabled. Exactly, you shouldn't
even read this but watch the imagery instead... hmm.. IF you read this, there
is something wrong.
Go and enable javascript in your browser so you can watch the actual site.
Believe me, it is more worthwhile than reading my hapless babbling here...
Much fuzz was made by various groups about what exactly Freddie Mercury has
been. I recently read something about him on some gay website.. recommendable
as it might be I wonder what the site would have had to say had Freddie not
been gay or bi or whatever. Same applies to those jumping upon his ethnicity,
when he becomes an icon of the Parsi world or a celebration for the Zoroastrian
religion. As far as I know Freddie was an agnostic but I'm not sure.
Why must there always be a package to stuff anything in? Wasn't Freddie Mercury
great enough in his own right to stand simply as what he was: Freddie Mercury?
I wonder if that was what he meant when he said 'I'm just a musical prostitute, my dear'.
One of the very first 'videos' I saw of Freddie Mercury was an old video cassette containing a couple of show recordings inclusing the Bohemian Rhapsody. The tape wasn't the best and it all was blurred black and white. However, I'm mad enough to like such things...
Holy goatshite that was 25 years ago... I thought it was just last week....
"When I'm performing I'm an extrovert, yet inside I'm a completely different man." - Freddie Mercury
"...yet inside I'm a completely different man." - Black & White taken to extreme
In the backview I sometimes wonder if Freddie Mercury really was so nonchalant about the moloch he had raised and was seen to handle so well - his fame, his rock star personality, his outside image, that masterpiece of a man that he has so artistically modeled for the world to see.
It finally happened - happened
It finally happened - ooh oh
It finally happened
....
Freddie was a great cat-lover and being a cat-lover myself I always liked
that aspect about him. Catpeople are special people... when I sometimes
pondered what I would have talked about had I ever had the chance to meet
Freddie Mercury it wouldn't have been hard to guess: cat food, cat toys, the
best cat diets, the disadvantages of dry food, his cats, my cats etc. etc...
The image is a composition of Freddie and a couple of cats from the
Il-Gatti-Tarot - and I just love it!
Ah.. Freddie... take good care of my Charlie for me, will you? Since the best always was just good enough for Charlie, I'm kinda sure he has long found your lap to purr on over there on the other side...
A real artist lives for his work and Freddie Mercury was no exception. The last videos he made are prove of his greatness as an artist and his spirit as a human. The last album - Innuendo - was perhaps the best the group had made in a long time.
Freddie Mercury died on November 24, 1991 at the age of 45. The cause of his
death was bronchial pneunomia brought on by AIDS. Only 24 hours before he had
announced that he suffered from the disease.
For many his untimely death was a shock and the sadness never left.
The Raven says Good-Bye....