*Before reading this article I recommend listening to both of the songs below.
While listening to my classic rock playlist amidst doing laundry and chores, I had the unexpected pleasure of listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” by Meatloaf play back-to-back. On the surface, it seems like these songs have nothing in common. One song can be heard as a complete narrative, while the other is broken into almost nonsensical lyrics and styles.
As I further contemplated the two seemingly very different songs, I wondered if they were truly so different, or if they were more alike than they seemed.
I decided to dig a little further into the songs.
First, I had to address the style of the songs. “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” are the same genre of song that is relatively unique for classic rock – a rhapsody. By definition, “a rhapsody as a musical form is a single-movement work that is episodic (i.e., has distinct groups of musical ideas), free-flowing in structure, and features a range of highly contrasting moods” (Macdonald, “Important question…”). “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” consists of 4 separate sections or episodes, all having different tempi, textures, dynamics, and melodies. “Bohemian Rhapsody” has 3 separate sections and a coda that repeats characteristics of the first section.
While “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” is longer than “Bohemian Rhapsody”, that longer length can be attributed to the song’s playful and flirtatious back and forth style between the singers Meatloaf and Ellen Foley in which lyrics and sections are often repeated to each other.
This leads me to the next point: content. Both songs are about, you guessed it, relationships. “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” is more easily determined to be about a relationship, giving the listener points of view from both the man and the woman. The song focuses on a couple parked in a car with the man trying to seduce the woman, hence, he would be in paradise by seducing her in the car. The woman stops him, demands to know if he loves her and if he will love her forever, to which he responds that he, “needs to think on it”. He eventually gives in, then laments that he is “waiting for the end of time” so he no longer has to be with her.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” is more abstract. While Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen and the song’s writer, refused to elaborate on the meaning of the lyrics and song, he did state that the song was about relationships and was quite personal to him. Since there is no concrete answer to what the lyrics mean, much can be inferred and interpreted.
The year that Freddie Mercury wrote the song, it is widely speculated that he began a relationship with another man while living with his then girlfriend, Mary Austin. With this information, many of the lyrics in the first segment can be interpreted as an apology to his girlfriend. One line of the verse, “put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead” infers that he became intimate with another man. He apologizes, “didn’t mean to make you cry”, and his telling her go continue her life without him “if I’m not back again this time tomorrow, carry on” and “gotta leave you all behind and face the truth”.
The second and third sections focus on him wanting to be free from all forms of oppression and judgement, whether societal, religious, or personal. In the third segment, he questions authority and his loved ones, with the air of wanting to remove himself from the situation entirely.
United in style and theme, these two songs take a very different approach to the narrative of relationships. On the surface, one so absurd but with deeply personal meaning, and one driven with passion and regret within the span of one night.
Macdonald, Kyle. “Important question: is ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ an actual rhapsody?”. Classic fM, 24 July, 2019, https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/music-theory/queen-bohemian-rhapsody-structure/ . Accessed 1 September 2022.
https://justrandomthings.com/2018/05/16/queen-bohemian-rhapsody-lyrics-review-and-song-meaning/
https://americansongwriter.com/queen-bohemian-rhapsody/
I was so excited to read this. Queen is one of my favorite bands, if not my absolute favorite. Bohemian Rhapsody is one the best songs ever, so I am always excited to have an excuse to talk/listen about it. Even with how much I enjoy the song, I never knew about the history behind it. It puts the lyrics into perspective. Freddie Mercury was such an interesting and unique person. You can really tell that his personality and his anguish was put into that song. I always felt that he struggled within himself so much that he put those differing emotions together into the rhapsody for everyone to hear. As for the similarities between the two songs, I had never really considered them to be similar at all. Maybe that is a tribute to how different relationships can be; the topic is the same, and yet people have completely different interpretations. Wonderful analysis!