every person can feel freddie’s presence in their souls when they sing MAMAAAAAA UUHHHH, I DONT WANNA DIE, I SOMETIMES I WISH I’VE NEVER BEEN BORN AT ALL with all the air in their lungs i’m not joking

it’s fucking crazy to think about the amount of people who have sung bohemian rhapsody? like it’s such a unifying song, by nature of the fact that so many people know it. it holds so many good memories for me and other people. it’s a song you scream in the car with your friends while you drive around your boring hometown, it’s a song you drunkenly sing with your arm around your best friend, or a song you sing along to with strangers when it’s on in public. it’s bittersweet to think about freddie’s legacy carrying on like that through his masterpiece. freddie carries on because he’s a part of so many people’s good memories and bohemian rhapsody is a huge part of that.

Reblog if you have sung bohemian rhapsody with your friends

every time i see this post i’m reminded of the video of 65,000 people singing bohemian rhapsody in near-perfect harmony

like, what other song can make that claim?

Some of the highlights of that video include:

Only days before my state went into lockdown, “Bohemian Rhapsody” came on in the restaurant kitchen I’d just been hired at and, no shit, every single worker in that little diner started singing along. Me (the only queer afaik), the manager, all the other kitchen workers, the dishwasher up front, the two people on the counter, all but two of the men over 30. Just belting out Freddie Mercury at the top of their lungs. And you can bet when “sometimes I wish I’d never been born at all” came around, we every single one of us ramped up the intensity and basically made sure Freddie could hear us in the afterlife.

One of the things that struck me, listening to the video, is that you cannot distinguish the original vocals from the crowd, and sometimes you can barely hear the music. And the POV is on the stage the speakers are playing the song from!

There’s good reason why, nearly fifty years after the height of their career, Queen is still considered one of the best bands of all time ever.

(And how albums left lying about in cars will eventually metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.)

Something else that’s rather incredible about this is, Bohemian Rhapsody is a very difficult song from a technical standpoint. Like–humor me, okay, go flip it on and try to sing the whole thing at the top of your voice without falling off-key, out of breath, or cracking at least once. Then come back.

Okay. You’re back? Welcome back. Unless you’re a trained singer, you probably can’t do it. There are too many long notes, too many key changes, and too many places where–if you’re singing all the parts–you’re just up and down the scale too damned fast. I’m saying this as a trained singer and I can’t do it. I always crack on “magnifico” and “leave me to die,” and I have a pretty decent range, but I know I sound ugly as hell on that final coda.

Okay. Now that we’ve established that, I want to talk a little about singing as a chorus. One of the things a lot of people learned during the pandemic is how hard it is to take twenty people, all in different places, and stitch them together to make a single coherent song with perfect pitch and timing. You’re all practicing on slightly your own tempo, slightly your own key, even if you’re all working from the same base track. (You can see this in a lot of the Wellerman compilations from Tiktok, where someone always says “Soon” a moment before everyone else on “soon may the Wellerman come.”) When you have a chorus comprised of many smaller choruses that are all traveling to be together, this is what dress rehearsal is for–to get all of you onto the same tempo so you’re starting and finishing at exactly the same time. This is a thing that normally only happens after at least several days of practice, and it is an important skill that must be taught. You’re not just born knowing how to do this.

I do not know how many people at that Green Day concert were trained singers. But I do know there is no way in hell all few thousand of them were a single group–they showed up a few at a time, maybe even flying solo for the night. Now go and listen to the video again. Listen to the ends of verses and the pickups. They’re fucking crisp as hell. Everyone is starting and ending at the same place. Not even a single note off. (And yes, you can hear when it’s a single note off, even in a crowd that big. A handful of people would be enough to throw it off.) And while a few in the crowd may be off-key, so many more are on-key that the cumulative effect is of the song being on-key. This isn’t even the band they’re there to see.

They don’t just know this song, this technically-difficult song, this long and complex song by a completely different band. They know it perfectly. They know it down to the fucking note. They know it so well that they did it in perfect synchrony, without a single chance to practice.

Do you know how insane that is?

💛 i will never believe in anything again ❤️

i still think about "aye moira am oan the protein" way too often

gay sex wasn't legal in kansas until 2 years before supernatural started airing. just btw

charlie was introduced as canon lesbian 3 years before obergefell v hodges legalized queer marriage nationally

don't ask don't tell was repealed when supernatural was on season SEVEN

the role of the person in the passenger seat is not only navigator but secretary as well. you have to type up the drivers messages to random ladies on facebook about cbd cream & google whether that billy joel song was the theme song for that show or not

you also have to provide a henchmans disdainful scowl at whoever the driver is flipping off in the target parking lot

other assorted roles may include

Don't forget the Tommy Gun

You should never forget the Tommy Gun

served my duty as an autistic artist and made a bunch of autism creature reaction images

this? is this what you're referring to? yeah i think calling other people slurs is bad

"i'm literally tweaking" "are you restarted" "you sound acoustic right now" "this has crackhead energy" "my ex is such a narcissist" "i'm going nonverbal for an hour" "intrusive thoughts won"

abstract and modern art haters are sooo snobby like klein literally Created an entirely new pigment and then painted a canvas in a way where the brush strokes wouldn't be visible. the insinuation that people with no skill could reproduce that is so annoying because unless you are skilled at color mixing and painting you definitely couldn’t lmao

i hope it's okay to add this because i think it hits the nail directly on the head

Honestly, it's like picking up a book and saying "I know all these words, I can type, I could have written this" like there's no middle step between the technical ability and the finished work.

Are we still on this??? Can u let the public enjoy art in a way u disagree with?????? Why is every1 defending this. U kno art like that is just bougeousie trading cards right??? Its worth is arbritary!!!!!!!!!!! Sorry its not sacred let people live

I mean that's the problem, it's not enjoying art at all it's an immature and clearly misinformed anti-intellectual approach to art. It's just blatantly wrong to stand next to a klein blue painting and say you can make it because you absolutely could not without any background in art. Abstract art is not a lesser or easier form of art it is built out of decades of experience with art. It's like the stylization of the human body to do it well you need to know the rules and how to break them. You can have whatever feelings you want about the work aesthetically but its such a revealing thing to boldly say you could make it. Like go ahead it will set you on a long winding multi-year path of learning new techniques, hand pigment creation. Maybe you'll come out the other end appreciating how skillful it actually is.

Neil Banging Out The Tunes turns 18 today!!!

Happy birthday little buddy !!!! To celebrate, I allowed Neil to partake in many of the legal privileges that one acquires upon turning 18:

nobody wants to hear you sing about tragedy.

eventually you realize you don’t want to die. you just don’t want to live the life you’re living. and slowly you try to create a life you want to live. just gotta start there.

no one needs to add “sounds fake but ok”, “no”, “well, not me”, “impossible”, etc. to this post. and i’d rather you not.

one day you think: I want to die.

and then you think, very quietly: actually. actually. I think I want a coffee. a nap. a sandwich. a book.

and I want to die turns day by day into I want to go home, I want to walk in the woods, I want to see my friend, I want to sit in the sun

I want a cleaner kitchen

I want a better job

I want to live somewhere else

I want to live

they just don’t do any classic homophobic children moments like this anymore 

There was really no winning that one

one important insight is that suffering is bad; this seemingly obvious idea is surprisingly counterintuitive to humans, who often assume that suffering must be good or we wouldn’t have so much of it.

I was struck by a part in an interview with a biologist about invertebrate consciousness (it was in a Thing of Things linkpost) where he said that only certain types of animals feel suffering, because it’s an evolutionary adaptation that requires certain structures in the brain: “That is, suffering only benefits animals who can hide, then tend their wound for a long time as they heal. Animals that can do these things — such as most mammals, octopuses, and crabs —have the suffering type of pain, as that pain nicely tells them the progress of their healing. By contrast, animals that live in the open in view of predators cannot show any signs of pain or weakness because it is a red flag that signals the predators to attack. In theory, such vulnerable animals could suffer pain and just ignore it, but the most successful members are those that don’t suffer the pain at all: then, they don’t have to fake a lack of pain. Animals in this group are most of the fishes and insects. Whenever the bad aspect of suffering (vulnerability to predators) outweighs its benefits (time for better healing), there will be natural selection for less ability to feel suffering.” He went on to clarify that he believes all animals can feel sharp pain–that is, injury–and that he distinguishes sudden pain from “suffering.” But I was struck by the idea of suffering as something that is supposed to tell you when you need to hide, rest, and heal. That felt like it might link to, say, depression, in some important ways…like why it can be so terribly hard to get out of bed when we’re suffering emotionally.  Anyway clearly pain has utility in a biological, evolutionary-advantage kind of way, so that might be why we tend to try and assign moral value to it as well.

well-calibrated pain is incredibly useful, and life tends to be very short without it, but I think the just world fallacy leads us to believe that experiencing more of it is beneficial to the world in some vague sense, when it really isn’t.

'Sit In My Valley' Lounge Chair by Lionel Jadot