Mike Dawson
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A Year of Making Comics - Update #12
🕑 Added 2023-03-26 21:06:49 +0000 UTC
There is an ad for Amazon Prime (I know, I know...), apparently directed by Olivia Wilde, where a girl who feels ugly goes onto Amazon and buys a Freddie Mercury jacket and goes to school feeling confident and acts fabulous, and watching it filled me with all sorts of feelings. One of them was jealousy.
I was out walking my dog this morning, and it came to me, the reason I felt that way. There's a scene in my 2008 "graphic memoir" Freddie & Me where I depict myself in High School, circa 1992. I'm feeling sad and low, and then out of nowhere I start belting out Queen's "Somebody to Love". Everyone in the cafeteria is awed. They can't believe what they're seeing. All of a sudden I am fabulous also.
The feelings come from a few different places. There's the basic feeling that this was a fantasy of mine, and (even though it's not real, it's a commercial), I'm seeing someone else "live it". And there's the question of the song choice. In my fantasy I'm singing "Somebody to Love", a Classic Rock staple, agreed upon rock-solid Queen song, can't complain about it. But the girl in the ad is dancing and strutting around to a much less well-known song, "Cool Cat", from Queen's 1982 flop, Hot Space.
This is Queen's "disco" album. Following 1980's The Game, which featured their funk-infused hit "Another One Bites The Dust", Hot Space was like a whole album of that kind of music. Disco, R&B, dance. Very different from most other Queen albums, and absolutely not an album that the fans loved. Queen followed up with an album in 1984 called The Works that was all the heavy stuff that the fans wanted. They called it The Works because it was like a pizza with all the toppings. Hot Space was dropped from their repertoire, never spoken of again, and among the fandom it was understood, this was Queen's "bad album".
But the thing was... I always kind of liked Hot Space... and, seeing this young person, dancing freely to it, no insecurities... well, that's perhaps another thing that gave me feelings.
Will update more this week as I make progress shaping this into an essay.
Comments
Mike Dawson
Awesome! I've been thinking about it more all day, I think it's starting to come together well
Jeanine McCarthy
As a music fangirl before being a fangirl was cool, just hearing you describe this and try to sort out your feelings about it struck some ol' chords with me as well. Really looking forward to seeing how this takes shape!
