Within the world of music, there are a lot of bands, producers and even listeners who pride themselves on a certain level of taste. While this might start out as an admirable motive to only enjoy the finest art, it usually ends up looking down one’s nose at projects deemed to have a lower brow. Queen could never be considered snobs of the music business.
From the first time they recorded an album, the rock monarchs were looking to branch out into every genre they could find within the rock pantheon, marrying elements of operatic rock, prog-rock, and metal under one roof on their first album alone. Once they started moving outside the confines of their traditional sound, though, Brian May thought they took a few missteps along the way.
Granted, Queen were never known to shy away from experimentation, even if it was ill-advised. Despite the band’s inherent rock sound, Freddie Mercury’s ability to turn in show tunes on songs like ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’ were perfectly charming detour when operating next to sonic juggernauts like ‘Brighton Rock’.
It’s not like May was averse to change, either. During the band’s stadium-rock years, May was arguably responsible for some of the most uncommercial elements of their sound, having the idea of making a song with hardly any instrumentation that would later become ‘We Will Rock You’. As the band ascended to stadium rock heights, though, they started to admire the modern sounds of the 1980s.
After claiming that no synthesisers were a part of their core studio albums in their early days, the band would eventually embrace the keyboards on albums like The Game, featuring some of their most celebrated attempts at pop music like ‘Another One Bites the Dust’. Although the group would see one of their biggest hits come out of the deal, they doubled down too much for May’s taste on the following album.
Inspired by the recent success of ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, Hot Space was crafted to sound like a modern take on Queen’s classic sound, featuring some of the squelchy synthesisers on a Queen record. Although the album did yield a handful of decent hits like ‘Back Chat’ and ‘Body Language’, May thought that the entire operation was a massive wrong turn.
When talking about the album later, May would consider the album one of the worst sonic detours the band had ever made, saying, “I think Hot Space was a mistake if only timing-wise. We got heavily into funk, and it was quite similar to what Michael Jackson did on Thriller. But the timing was wrong. Disco was a dirty word.”
Although most fans tend to agree with May’s opinion, there’s much more to Hot Space than the disco-tinged beats and dance textures. Across the back half of the album, the John Lennon tribute ‘Life is Real’ and the colossal singalong ‘Under Pressure’ is more than enough to give the album a shot, almost as if those songs were thrown onto the record to cushion the blow of the disco sounds.
In fact, there is a good cause to suggest that, to contain the magnificent brilliance of ‘Under Pressure’, a song considered by some to be the perfect pop song, the album deserves its place among the cherished discography of the band. But that’s what happens when you’re a perfectionist like Brian May.
Regardless of how many sore spots are on Hot Space, it’s a testament to the power of Queen’s music that they could still explore new avenues in the studio and still make something halfway decent out of it. Then again, since the pop charts have embraced the sounds of disco for the past few years, perhaps time has been kind to Queen’s attempt to put some boogie in their sound.
