Queen/YMMV

• Anvilicious: "White Man", "Put Out the Fire" & "Tie Your Mother Down".
• Critical Dissonance: Their popularity with the music press was inversely proportionate to their popularity with their audiences. By the onset of the 1980s, they could have legitimately claimed to be the biggest band in the world, but at the same time Rolling Stone was denouncing them as "the world's first fascist rock band".
  • But, of course, see Vindicated by History below.
• Ear Worm: Many.
• Epic Riff: Lots, from Keep Yourself Alive to White Man to Another One Bites The Dust, an epic bass riff.
  • "We Will Rock You". Off the top of your head, how many drum riffs can you name?
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: What exactly are their songs about again? According to the band themselves whatever you want.
  • Most of the dissections and analyses of Bohemian Rhapsody tend to veer off into this category.
• Face of the Band: Freddie Mercury. Overlaps in the public mind with I Am the Band, as even the fans who don't regard new singers as replacement Scrappies will tend to agree that there is no Queen without Freddie.
  • To be honest, there wouldn't be a Queen without Brian May either; his distinctive guitar style is just as important to Queen's trademark sound as Freddie's vocals.
    • According to Freddie himself (Circus mag, 1977), if ANY of the four left, it'd be the end of Queen.
  • This trope could slightly apply as the band's career went on, with the gradual reduction in the amount of songs with lead vocals by the other members.
• Fan Dumb: Unavoidable in a band with a fanbase as large as the Queen one. For example, there are the homophobic Queen fans who believe Freddie Mercury was a straight man assassinated by a gay conspiracy led by Elton John (that's an actual theory. There was a published book about it).
• Fanon Discontinuity: Narrowly averted with Hot Space (for some), because of the presence of David Bowie on Under Pressure, the one (and usually only) track that everyone enjoys.
  • To a lesser extent Made in Heaven though this is more related to Innuendo's status as a Dying Moment of Awesome than anything else.
  • The Paul Rodgers album might be a better example. Many fans feel that the lack of Freddie makes it not a Queen album. Even non-fans have commented that it sounds more like a Paul Rodgers album than Queen.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: Freddie's statement that "we're going to stay together until we fucking well die, I assure you." Ouch.
  • That line is followed by "I keep wanting to leave... but they won't let me!"
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Queen is very popular in Iran, partly due to the fact that Freddie Mercury was of Iranian descent. They were also pretty popular in Japan, which was acknowledged with the Japanese lyrics of "Teo Torriatte".
  • According to Brian May, Queen was worried for a time that they'd neglected their native Britain during the seventies (in spite of their considerable success at home) in favour of making it in America, but the massive success of their free concert in Hyde Park in 1977 allayed their fears.
  • When their 1980s music and Camp image (and a payola scandal on EMI, their second label) alienated much of their American fanbase, they concentrated on England, Europe, Japan and South America both as touring stops and music markets. A large amount of Queen's music became hits overseas, but largely ignored in the States, to the point that much of the 1992 Classic Queen Greatest Hits Album was filled with material unfamilar to Americans.
• Growing the Beard: Sheer Heart Attack is regarded as the band's first great album. Hot Space is generally the point where fans agree that they shaved off the beard.
  • Said beard was grown back, depending on one's point of view, either at Live Aid in 1985, with the release of A Kind of Magic and its accompanying tour in 1986 or even as late as 1991, when the band released Innuendo.
  • The early and late (i.e. no-synth and synth) periods of the band (the former as an art/progressive-rock album band, the latter as a mainstream pop group) are reflected in their long/short hair periods as well as Freddie's moustache.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Some of the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody, especially the ones relating the impending death of Freddie's character.
  • Hammer To Fall really sounds as if it was written after Freddie was diagnosed with AIDS, the lyrics are eerily apt, but it was actually written a couple of years before he knew he had AIDS.
    • On top of that, it was written by Brian May.
• Ho Yay: Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor: best friends, metrosexuals, exceptionally good with high falsetto vocals, party animals, heavy smokers (at least at some point) and drinkers.
  • Freddie and Roger roomed together as college students.
  • Just listen to unreleased track "Dog With a Bone."
• Memetic Badass: Freddie. 'Nuff said.
  • AIDS didn't kill him! Pure epic power simply overwhelmed his body and he ascended back to the higher plane of existence from whence he came.
• Never Live It Down: For a while, it was their decision to perform at Sun City. Mostly that's forgotten, but it caused a massive uproar at the time.
• Painful Rhyme: From "Radio Ga Ga": "stick around, 'cause we might you / when we grow tired of all this visual.".
• Replacement Scrappy: Paul Rodgers. His tours with the band and the addition of Bad Company and Free songs to the set were actually fairly popular with fans, but the less said about the original album they recorded the better.
  • Crosses into Fan Dumb territory, since Rodgers wasn't a replacement. It was "Queen teams up with Paul Rodgers", not "Paul Rodgers becomes a member of Queen".
• Stuck in Their Shadow: While John Deacon is considered one of the best bassists in rock music, his personality was too reserved to make him as memorable as the more dynamic band members (like some other nonetheless talented bass guitarists called John.)
• Tear Jerker: Now has its own page.
• Unfortunate Implications: It's hard to listen to "One Vision" without being reminded of the motto of Nazi Germany: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer".
  • I'm astounded at the number of people who think '39 is about World War II. Did they ever really listen to the lyrics? "In the days when lands were few" "In the year of '39 ... the volunteers came home ... and they bring good news of a world so newly born". Do they really want to go there?!
• Vindicated by History: Brian May has said that, in retrospect, he thinks that Queen II was probably the strongest album the band ever recorded. Similarly, some critics have reconsidered the first album and judged it to be a perfectly good hard rock debut.
  • Also Freddie himself: while alive, he was regarded by many tabloids as a conceited gay showman with some (but not too much) talent and more often than not Brian was shown as the musical anchor (although his personal life was heavily criticised especially in the 80's). Recently, the press tends to refer to Freddie as a great late musical genius without whom Brian and Roger are nothing.
  • Hot Space has become much more appreciated in recent years, what with the revival of funk and disco music by modern artists, especially those in the electropop genre.