Tuesday Shit Talk: Get Down Make Love

How Queen's 'News of the World' predicted the future and made me predictable

Oh, hey there!

It’s Scorpio season, so bear with me while we dig into good-time themes, like sex, drugs, rock and roll, destruction, and rebirth in Gen X pop culture. Remember this Queen song?

Have you played this song lately? It’s been a while for me, but I heard it yesterday. I must’ve been around nine when I first laid hands on Queen’s News of the World, probably in the Zayre’s (eventually to become Ames, ultimately consumed by TJX companies) down the street from where I grew up. It was an ALL CAPS HUGE record; “We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions” was the conjoined anthem blasting out of every rolled-down car window. A huge fan of “Killer Queen” and those songs, I had to know what more the latest Queen record had to offer so I saved up my meager allowance until I could swing a copy and marched my ass over to the store to buy it.

Once I tore off the shrink wrap, I examined the album cover for clues about its contents like a forensic scientist.

The cover was a painting by American sci-fi artist Frank Kelly Freas of a giant robot holding the bodies of Freddie Mercury, Brian May (the Louis XIV hair is a, pardon the pun, dead giveaway), and John Deacon in one hand, while blood dripped off the middle finger of the other. A glint of regret seemed visible in eyes that were wet and human; as if it knew not what it did until it was too late. The idea that humans were no match for this enormous otherworldly machine shook me to my core.

Anyway, Queen approached Freas to work on their album cover after seeing a book cover for The Gulf Between by Tom Godwin, a story about a future society where robots can be doctors or pilots but, in a role that hearkens directly to the present, must obey commands without question. AI, much?

News was a double album, so there were three additional frames Freas used to storyboard his concept.

Here, it reaches through the torn molten core of the earth into a stadium full of Queen fans to pluck out a few more.

For whatever reason, drummer Roger Taylor slips through its fingers and grasps at the air as he plummets helplessly back down to earth.

Beyond “We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions,” News is an album that FCKS heavily with themes of sex and death. The next track, “Sheer Heart Attack” written by Roger Taylor, is a guitar-driven, anxiety-inducing, horny punk nod to how the hotness of underaged youth can stress older folk.

Then, we foray into a tribute to the bacchanalian orgy of “Get Down Make Love.” Looking back, it’s a lesson in how drum rests can shape an infectious tune but, upon first listen, I was utterly fascinated. I had absolutely no idea what “making love” meant, but the erotic thump and grind of the rhythmic cymbal and kick drum oozed the secrets of Lazarus, signaling entrée into an underworld only grownups gained entrée into, and man, was I curious. Full of double entendres, it’s a song about being human, confined to the flesh and its myriad pleasures, about wanting to FCK the pain away, into another world. It’s an aural raised glass to his voracious sexual appetite, always wanting to FCK when all your partner wants is a glass of water. Essentially the verse is structured in a saucy rhythmic call and response, the drums and guitar in tension with Freddie Mercury’s unbridled vocal. The chorus is more trad rock, but the bridge is wild, with Freddy’s vocals fading in and out to the tinkles of a space-aged synth as if his jizz was blasting him in and out of another dimension.

When the album wasn’t about FCKNG, it explored the themes of death and depression. “Spread Your Wings” was about a dude who worked at a bar, so discontented with how his life turned out that he wanted to “fly away” even though he knew he was a free man. “All Dead, All Dead” is a Roger May lament about having lived, loved, and lost. The whole listening experience seeded some serious Scorpionic concepts about death and rebirth into my fertile young brain.

Today, a dear friend and I went out for coffee and, in bemoaning how our faith in humanity circles the bowl by the second, she mentioned a genuine curiosity about the possibility of alien life forms. Are they out there? If so, do they know how stupid our species is?

My first instinct was to counter that aliens were man-made, that they’re actually AI. We then lamented our phone addictions, and how our serotonin-driven dependence on these tiny robots has kept us silent and rapt as the automated arm of man’s inhumanity to man rips off the earth’s core and scoops up its latest victims before our very eyes. I thought of the album cover that once terrified me and wondered if it did so because it loosely portended the present. The evidence of the inevitable robot’s revenge was laid bare before us by the seminal soothsayers of rock and roll all along!

Are you ready for the punchline? As of writing this post RIGHT THIS SECOND, I was once again reminded I’m not alone, and that no cultural criticism is truly original. As I Googled for information, I just now learned that News of the World had the exact same effect on Stewie Griffin.

Watch the whole thing—it’s priceless. Stewie goes, “I’ll tell you what the news of the world is! We’re in a FCK of a lot of trouble!”

Forget rock and roll. If you want to peer into the future, Seth MacFarlane is your guy.

xx

MF