<s>British</s> Writer Celebrates Fascistic, Bleacher-Stomping Jock Jam

jharv | August 16, 2007 1:15 am
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The Guardian examines the Pavlovian magic that is Queen’s “We Will Rock You” when blaring at bowel-loosening volume in a sporting arena (with a few bonus chuckles about the Holocaust and the Inquisition). In a paean to a band that no one in the English speaking world has yet forgotten, writer Joe Queenan makes a big play of the keerazy idea that the U.S. is different than the U.K. and how “the staggering success of Queen itself [exemplifies] how events can occur simultaneously, yet be remembered as having taken place in different historical eras”:

Paul Klee was painting his zippy little cats at the very same time that Adolf Hitler was attempting to exterminate European Jewry. The Renaissance was concurrent with the Inquisition. Queen was enjoying breathtaking success with its camp, baroque, neo-Vaudevillian music at the same time that the Sex Pistols and the Ramones were labouring valiantly – though with mixed results – to return rock’n’roll to its primeval roots. It is a great irony that at sporting events held in Madison Square Garden, We Will Rock You appears on the same playlist as I Wanna Be Sedated. Queen sold hundreds of millions of records; the American public did not discover the Ramones until half of them were dead. And the American public never bought their records.

Nothing like a well-reasoned analogy to drive your point home. Now c’mon, the Ramones may have been a “cult” band rather than Queen-level superstars, but they were hardly Seymour Stein’s charity case either. The rest of this idea seems chalk-uppable to Brit/American cultural differences, like Queenan seemingly being unfamiliar with, say, the often bizonkers choice of at-bat music among American baseball players. A lot of crazy shit gets played at stadiums, and it has nothing to do with its commercial viability and everything to do with what it does to shirtless fat guys full of Coors Light. 2 Unlimited didn’t sell zillions of records to the “American public” either.

[EDIT: Thanks to reader Brian McManus and a few commenters for noting that Joe Queenan is, in fact, not British at all. Mea culpa. On the other hand, this makes Queenan’s LOLz over the Ramones/Queen issue even sillier. Go to a football game, homey.]

Was There Ever A Time When “We Will Rock You” Did Not Exist? [The Guardian]

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