Queen “The Miracle”
In my elementary school years, before I discovered pretense, girls and Tom Verlaine, I loved Queen. More specifically, I loved Queen’s “Greatest Hits.” I was overwhelmed with the deliriousness of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I would sing and dance in my room to “Don’t Stop me Now.” I would marvel at the heights of “Somebody to Love.” I would practice karate to “We Will Rock You.” I knew nothing of camp. I knew very little about the band or its members. But I fucking loved those songs.
As a teenager, I traded in my baseball cards for Robert Christgau’s “Record Guide.” I considered that book with an almost biblical reverence. Bob told me that Queen basically sucked and that The New York Dolls and Wire were everything. I fully believed him. I left my copies of “The Game,” “Jazz” “News of the World,” and “A Night at the Opera” for destitution. I was certain Bob was right. His writing was so incisive and confident. How could he not be right? In 1989, I was in peak Christgau-dom. As my eyes and ears opened to Punk, Post-Punk and the subpopular, they simultaneously closed on Classic Rock. Steve Miller sucked in 1989. Eric Clapton mostly sucked. Pink Floyd kind of sucked. But, I was certain, beyond question, that Queen totally sucked. If ever asked about the band, I would disavow my former love, roll my eyes and refer the matter to “Hot Space” and “The Works.” It seemed beyond question to me then that Queen was both highly uncool and well past prime. End of subject.
That same year, Queen released “The Miracle,” their penultimate studio album with Freddie Mercury. In preceding years, the band had frayed a bit. Three of the four members had released solo albums. Their sales and chart positions, especially in America, had taken a downturn. And, by many accounts, Freddie was preparing for a future as a solo artist. 1985s “Live Aid” performance certainly helped revive the band’s notoriety, but did not, by any means, solve their struggles in the studio. For the much of the decade, the band sounded like four polite gentlemen, contributing doll parts to albums which were sewn together by synthesizers. With the exception of the anthemic singles, the records sounded cheap and songless, like beats and bass lines left over for after hours' embellishment by Freddie Mercury and Brian May. Fortunately, or sadly, depending on how you look at it, in Freddie and Brian, Queen had arguably the greatest singer and guitarist of their generation. That was enough to make each album interesting. But it was also so much as to make each of them sound like a waste of talent.
1989s “The Miracle” was supposed to be different. For one, it had been three years since their last album, “A Kind of Magic,” which was ostensibly a reworked soundtrack album for the film “Highlander.” Additionally, it was the first album wherein all songs were credited simply to Queen, rather than to the individual players. Finally, and mostly on the basis of “I Want it All,” the first single, the album was described as a return to the harder, guitar-driven Rock of their earlier days. What was not advertised in 1989, but was widely rumored, was Freddie’s declining health. In retrospect, “The Miracle” is almost entirely consumed with the optimism, loneliness, love and existentialism that would define the singer’s final years.
In 1989, bursting with awkward, adolescent pretension and knowing of (or caring for) very few of these details, I largely ignored “The Miracle.” The album’s cover, featuring all four members’ faces edited into one single mutant head and Freddie without a mustache, completely unnerved me. Additionally, what I did hear from the album on the radio, namely “I Want it All” and “Invisible Man,” sounded derivative to me -- like Queen imitating Queen. My teenage self had very little interest in it all. There were Talking Heads and Joy Division albums to unpack.
And with the turn of a radio dial, “The Miracle” was quickly gone from my life. In the subsequent years, the band released one last album with Freddie, who passed away in 1991. They stayed together, performing with Paul Rodgers and then Adam Lambert. They were posthumously coronated, first in “Wayne’s World” and then in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the biopic. Freddie’s life and death became a legend of the AIDs generation. Today, his tank top, mustache, foot stomping and fist in the air are the definition of “iconic.” The rest of the band, older and bookish as always, have persevered reverently, in homage to their former singer and to the very idea of Queen -- a kind of magic conjured with fast, Metal and dynamic, theatrical Pop. To give into Queen is to surrender to the grandeur and the camp of it all. The less you consider it, the more lovable it is.
With the benefit of time and distance, I chose to return to “The Miracle” because it was the first Queen album that I intentionally turned my back on way back when. Having listened to very little Queen since my teenage years, and almost nothing other than the radio hits, I found myself decidedly curious about the record. Candidly, and contrary to the first single and the promotion, I expected mostly disposable synth basslines and drums, mountains of Freddie’s vocal gymnastics and some intermittent Brian May flair. In my mind’s ear, I was hearing the very worst from “The Works” -- something like “I Want to Break Free,” but with less tune and irony. Most Queen albums, in my estimation, featured two or three anthemic tracks and a glut of filler that could border on uncooked garbage. I suspected that “The Miracle” was mostly the latter, if not worse, on account of the band’s middle age. Past prime is rarely “just O.K.” It is more frequently terrible or a breakthrough. I presumed the former.
Startlingly, I was wrong. “The Miracle” is not a mess. It has several lowlights, but it is, in fact, an above average Queen album and holds together thematically as the beginning of Freddie’s farewell. Contrary to rumor, it is also not a guitar record, though Brian May is given space to amaze. And in contrast to what was largely unsaid at the time, most of the songs unmistakingly reveal the singer to be confronting the end of his life. “Party,” “The Miracle,” “I Want it All,” “Rain Must Fall,” “Was it all Worth It,” and “Hang On in There” all deal with bittersweetness, the passage of time and sustaining optimism in the face of the impossible. Released soon after Brian May’s especially sad and public divorce, “The Miracle” sounds like an album confronting the end of things. And yet, true to form, it plays what might sound profoundly sad with a bombast and aplomb that only makes sense for a singer like Freddie Mercury and a band like Queen.
To be clear, there is some absolute shit on “The Miracle.” While every band member is credited with writing the songs, it sounds like they were actually constructed in one of two ways: either Freddie would scat sing a run and John Deacon would program a bass and drum beneath it or Brian May would bring in a monster riff and would work alongside Freddie to write a traditional verse and chorus. In both cases, the songs are often rough sketches, that would peter out without heaps of Freddie’s vocals, dashes of Brian’s guitar and the intra-song shapeshifting and genre hopping the band was known for. When Deacon’s bass lines are thin and Freddie is given too much leash, the results can be cloying. “Party,” the opener, sounds like a wildly missed attempt to recreate the effect of “We Will Rock You,” except for a fashion show rather than a sporting event. The song features the Freddie upon Freddie upon Freddie vocal trick that the band perfected on “Killer Queen,” but which gets old very fast. Almost any time the song seems not up to the idea of Queen’s greatness, Freddie goes overboard with vocals and Brian comes in with either a solo or a shift in time signature. Rarely does either trick work.
When they are most over the top, but without the girders of a guitar or bass hook, the songs topple over. The title track sounds like Freddie in Vegas, gilded for the first half and emerging as part singalong and part guitar showcase in the back half. The vocals are cloying and, even in 1989, it reeked of cheap sentiment. The singer and guitarist are so good that it is hard to call the song terrible, but it almost is. “Scandal” is similarly melodramatic, though this time the soap opera is told through Brian May’s guitar. Ominous and full of anger, the song falls short simply because the mood is so much bigger than the tune or riff. Brian May can make riffs equal to, if not greater than, Jimmy Page. But “Scandal” has nothing of the sort. It’s just a four minute warning and complaint that leaves the last minute to some frenzied May/Mercury apocalypse.
The lows of “The Miracle” are not all that low. Never afraid of self-satire or embarrassment, I don’t think there is anything on the album that suffers in comparison to the filler from most of their 80s work. To the contrary, each song sounds loved and considered. Some certainly suffer from thin tunes and tacky decor, but when you have perhaps the most singular voice and guitar tone in the history of Rock music, it can be hard to not show off. Queen is about nothing if not showing off.
As for the highs, they are pretty high. These are not the Himalayan peaks of 70s Queen, but today they do sound much more “classic” than “dated.” “I Want it All” is everything you remember, and then some. It is not the music I choose to listen to in middle age, but it is a flawless Queen single. It takes eighty percent of Led Zeppelin’s power and twenty percent of their wink and replays the same basic riffs through the inverse ratios. On “The Invisible Man,” Deacon programs a bass line that was so good, but so misplaced, that it sounds not unlike New Order or LCD Soundsystem. That is, until the singer arrives begins his acrobatics through both headphone channels. No, the song is not “cool,” but it is most definitely “fun.” Inconceivably, and thanks in no small part to James Murphy, the programming that sounded cheap to my ears in 1989, today sounds deeper and almost timeless.
Near the album’s close, on “Was it all Worth It,” Brian returns with the amperage and Freddie brings the Meat Loaf. In the yearning, you can almost see the singer holding up his handkerchief, asking the crowd to feel the feelings. In the back half, as the guitarist ushers in a mini symphony while Freddie ultimately answers the titular question. He shouts, “Yes it was!” In 1989, when Meatloaf and Jim Steinman were still the butts of jokes and Guns ‘n’ Roses were everything, “Was it all Worth It,” sounded like an anachronism. In 2020, the song can only read like an appropriately wild and indulgent farewell letter.
The vulnerable and formative part of me that pivoted away from Queen as a teenager did not want to like “The Miracle.” Everything would be a lot easier had it simply sucked, as I had suspected. Now middle-aged myself, I’ve been able to separate my interests from those of Robert Christgau and, hopefully, I have less to prove. I’m still not sure how much I like Queen. But I definitely love them in some way. Similarly, I’m still not sure that they were ever a good band. But frequently they were a great band. They were silly, overly-ambitious, unfocused, fun, inspiring, sad, messy, campy and dead fucking serious. And they had not one, but two members who could made music that sounded unlike, but better than, most anything that came before or since.