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| That Fairy Feller | | Date Created: 04 Sep, 2006, 12:23 PM |
 I came across a BBC program and an article in The Times commemorating Freddie Mercury’s 60th Birthday tomorrow. My brother was a huge Queen fan when we were growing up and Freddie’s voice provided a constant background track to the simultaneous drama and boredom of my teenage years. By 1990, I was living in the U.S., away from my brother’s record collection, and not listening to anything beyond the American college charts. December, 1991: I flew back to London to spend Christmas with my brother but due to a screw-up in our communication, he had gone back to Hong Kong to visit my parents and would not be back until Boxing Day. So there I was on Christmas Eve, stuck in a bachelor pad in Dulwich, alone with my frozen dinner and beer and what Christmas cheer I could muster from my jet-lagged and aspirin-addled brain. It was then, there, during my sad, sorry Christmas Eve alone that I saw a clip of Freddie singing These Are The Days Of Our Lives on TV. It had barely been a month since he died and the video, his last, was getting a lot of airplay. His death did not have quite the same resonance in the U.S. and I never really registered his passing until that moment. He was looking so frail and ill in the video, yet at the same time so ethereal and strangely beautiful. It was as though in his final months he had reverted to an aspect of his former self, shedding the iconic mustachioed macho leatherman to reveal the luminous, slender girl-boy that incarnated the soul of Bohemian Rhapsody. The video somehow brought me comfort: the agitated feeling of being irritatingly lonely dissipated and I simply felt serenely alone. It wasn't such a terrible Christmas Eve after all. I would go on to forget Queen for many years to come, but that black-and-white image of Freddie in his final months had lodged in the recess of my mind. Earlier this year, almost fifteen years since that Christmas, I saw a promo of an American Idol episode in which the contestants were asked to sing songs from the Queen catalogue. I tuned in, with the brutal curiosity of one turning to look at the twisted wreckage of a car accident. The songs were so butchered and blanched by the uninspired renditions that my buried memory of the original came shimmering back to life. Some $60 of iTunes downloads later ... there it is again. Two decades of Freddie’s voice soaring from hell to heaven and back to earth again, so brittle but so sweet, so huge yet intimate, so extravagant and so subtle all at once. I sometimes wonder how I could love the music of someone who called his own work “fish and chip paper” and “disposable, like last season’s fashion.” Someone who never read a newspaper and claimed shopping as his biggest passion. Freddie is the very antithesis to what I admire in other rock heroes: the poetry of Dylan, the spirit of protest in Neil Young and Springsteen, the rage and nihilism of Kurt Cobain. But then, I should have remembered from my love of classical Chinese poetry that there have always been two different poetic paths. Li Bai, the “poet-fairy” and Du Fu, the “poet-saint,” have remained the two most loved and revered poets in Chinese history. Li Bai, a lover of wine, alchemy, and courtly pleasures, wrote poetry that belongs with the heavens. Called the works of an “immortal exiled to the human realm,” his poetry was never bound by earthly concerns even when he himself was caught up in war, poverty, and ill health. Du Fu, on the other hand, wrote poetry that protests injustice and documents oppression and sufferings. Yet, Du Fu was a friend and tremendous admirer of Li Bai. And for centuries, no poetry lover ever felt the need to value one over the other. So, Freddie Mercury, a modern day poet-fairy incarnate, long gone from the earthly realm, whose unearthly voice rocks on, for those of us who still need and love it ... Oh it’s bliss. |
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