5/10/2023 0 Comments Beatles lend me your ears![]() I was so bummed out, I turned my back on Queen completely. Apart from a couple of songs (including "Under Pressure", which had actually been released in the US on their Greatest Hits album first), it was so different from what came before, I just couldn't get into it. To this day, Hot Space is the most divisive album in Queen's entire catalog, one of those "you either love it or hate it" things that polarizes fans.Īt the time, I was defiantly in the "hate it" camp. The reception was so bad in the US that Queen didn't return to America until 2005, twenty-three years later. It was not well received, and that's being polite. The result was a synthesizer-heavy funk/rock platter that confused everyone. Because as a young man whose entire worldly sense of self was based on the musical stylings of Freddie Mercury and his bandmates, I was existentially gobsmacked by the unexpected sonic left turn Queen took with their eleventh album.Įven though the overdubbed bombastic vibe that Queen had cultivated since Queen II had been stripped down to just pure rock 'n' pop for their platinum-selling album The Game, Freddie decided to push the band into the territory of the electronic dance scene he'd discovered in the clubs in Germany. Thank you for understanding the abysmal depths of my pain. I'm going to allow myself a moment here to absorb your expressions of sympathy, your condolences, your wails of empathetic grief. That was the day that Queen released Hot Space. ![]() But any of those things would have been a walk in the park compared to what happened on that fateful day. I wasn't diagnosed with a terminal disease. What was their earth-shaking tragedy? No, neither of my parents died. Everything I considered right and good in the world was upended and torn asunder. I experienced an event that rocked me to the very core of my soul. May 24th, 1982 was a day that changed my life forever. Thanks to the cultural revolutionaries who ran MTV, my entire way of approaching the world was upended by the majestic New Wave sound and style of. Completely by accident, my teenage self discovered that opening your mind to something new can actually change everything for the better. I now have hundreds of jazz albums, and listen to my jazz playlists a couple of times a week.īut the merest possibility of enjoying jazz couldn't have even dented my thick "I don't like it" skull if I hadn't had my attitude adjusted back in 1983, around my seventeenth birthday. And that one album opened my eyes and ears to the wonders of jazz. Then one day in maybe 1997 or 1998, a review of Stan Getz's and João Gilberto's self-titled album from 1963 (the one with "The Girl From Ipanema") enticed me into buying the CD. My mind wasn't ready to accept what jazz had to offer. It wasn't that I hated it, I just had no interest in it at all. Back in the day, I gave everything jazz a wide berth. Everyone has an opinion when it comes to music.Įvery once and a while, however, something comes along that can surprise you and change your opinion about a band, or even an entire genre. Some stuff gets you going, some stuff leaves you cold.Īnd is there any subject - apart from politics and religion - that divides people more than music? Music fans harbor very passionate opinions about the bands and artists and genres that they love. Everyone has their "likes" and "don't likes". I gave it all a try, but at the end of the day, none of it spoke to me. There's an entire spectrum of pop culture and fine art that I've been exposed to that does nothing for me. He likes a lot of stuff, but he doesn't go out of his way to appreciate things that don't speak to him on some level. well, everything, really, as Welles was known for being quite the raconteur.īut in this specific instance, he was explaining that if a "work of art" doesn't speak to him, then he doesn't feel like he has to make an effort to relate to it. That simple yet deep nugget of personal insight comes from the master himself, the legendary Orson Welles, offered up during a series of conversations he had with director Peter Bogdanovich. “ I don't know anything about art but I know what I like.”
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