MUSIC

The New Freddie Mercury Demo Has a Vital Message for Our Time

Mercury's stripped-down rendition of "Time Waits for No One" from the multimedia musical "TIME" is a stunning gift from an unforgettable talent.

Dressed in white from head to toe, surrounded by smoke and stage lights, Freddie Mercury looks every inch an angel descended to earth in the video for "Time Waits For No One."

Mercury first recorded the song in 1986, and a version featuring a massive choir of backing vocalists was released that same year. Yesterday marked the release of a never-before-heard demo of the song, featuring only his voice soaring over a triumphant piano backdrop. On it, the singer's unmistakable vocals take center stage, and the stripped-down arrangement communicates the lyrics' message even more powerfully than the original.

Freddie Mercury - Time (Official Video)www.youtube.com

"Time Waits For No One" is an almost painfully relevant song that seems handmade for our day and age—though, then again, its call to solidarity taps into something that humanity has seemingly always needed to hear. "We have to build this world together, or we'll have no future at all," Mercury sings, a resounding sentiment for our times and for all time.

The song is taken from a musical called TIME, with a book by David Clark and David Soames and music by Jeff Daniels. The show is about a rock star named Chris Wilder, who gets transported along with his band to the High Court of the Universe in the Andromeda Galaxy. Once there, he meets the Time Lord Melchisedic (allegedly inspired by the Time Lord of the Doctor Who series), who tells him that the moment has come to determine if the people on earth can be a part of the universal journey towards peace.

Time the Musical - Dave Clark and Cliff Richard, Freddie Mercury, Dionne Warwickwww.youtube.com

Though he never performed in the show, Mercury sang the main character's part on its concept album, which also featured Julian Lennon and Dionne Warwick. The show's spoken theme, which includes a philosophical speech narrated by Lawrence Olivier, was an unexpected hit on the charts in Australia, but in spite of this, the album remained offline until 2012, when a 25th-anniversary edition was released on iTunes.

"Time" (renamed with a longer title on the new demo) is the third track on the concept album. Apparently, Mercury preferred the demo to the official version. According to songwriter Dave Clark, "When we first recorded [the song], I went to Abbey Road and we ran through with just Freddie and piano. It gave me goosebumps. It was magic. Then we got down to recording the track and we [added] 48 tracks of voices, which had never been done in Abbey Road before, then the whole backing. It was fabulous—but I still felt there was something about the original rehearsal."

That something is palpable in the chill-inducing video from that first rehearsal. In it, Mercury is a larger-than-life presence, an embodiment of conviction and hope, communicating a message that seems to be largely absent in modern music. "Let us free this world forever, and build a brand new future for us all," he sings. His voice and presence, which radiate an almost unearthly star power even through the computer screen, are so powerful that you can't help believe in the possibility of a better world.

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Photo by Frank Augstein-AP-Shutterstock

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CULTURE

Kate Bush’s Rocket Man Video is Like if Hillary Clinton Tried to Make a Stoner Anthem

Kate Bush is an incredible musician and "Rocket Man"is an incredible song. So what went wrong?

Kate Bush - Rocket Man - Official Music Video

Kate Bush is a very, very talented musician. "Rocket Man" by Elton John is a very, very good song. So where did Kate Bush's cover go wrong?

It could've slept peacefully in the 1990s, accumulating cobwebs and fading from public consciousness. But today, Bush decided to release the video of her cover officially for the first time—alongside the announcement that an album of her B-sides and rarities, called The Other Side, is coming out on March 8th.

Bush's "Rocket Man" starts out promisingly, with Kate wailing in her singular soprano over dreamy synths, albeit sounding a bit breathier than usual. But disaster strikes about a minute into the video, when the full band leaps in with a disorienting reggae rhythm and Kate steps into the spotlight with a ukulele, hips swaying side to side robotically. The first chorus ends with a flourish on a sitar, a sound effect that's unexpected, to say the least, especially in light of the Uilleann pipes, concertinas, and synths jingling away in the background.

Kate Bush - Rocket Man - Official Music Videowww.youtube.com

It's too many genres mixed together, and it fails to capture any of what makes Kate Bush and Elton John so virtuosic. This cover skips all that and instead features a Celtic-sounding fiddle solo three-quarters of the way through, which collides disorientingly with the reggae beat.

The mash-up of styles is an issue, but another problem is that the whole band seems to be having way too much awkward middle-aged fun. Maybe the trouble is that "Rocket Man" is such an emotional song, but Bush seems to be trying to turn it into a stoner anthem—which Young Thug actually did more successfully, with his appropriately spacious "High." That cover is initially disorienting, but it possesses the melancholy expansiveness that makes the original "Rocket Man" so extravagant and blissful to listen to.

Young Thug - High (ft. Elton John) [Official Audio]www.youtube.com

Bush's cover feels like convoluted abstract art rather than music. If she's really using reggae and hip-shaking to turn "Rocket Man" into a celebration of marijuana, she's doing it in a way that's almost as cringe-worthy as when Hillary Clinton said that she was "just chillin'."

There are many ways to read "Rocket Man." It's rife with metaphors and cosmic allusions. It could be about getting stoned, sure, but it's almost certainly also about loneliness, life on the road, and the isolation of fame. Bush's cover just ignored all this, it seems. Her first hit was about Wuthering Heights; she can understand words, and she chose to read "Rocket Man" this way.

What a lost opportunity. Imagine "Rocket Man," but with the intensity, elegance, and clarity of vision that defines every track on Hounds of Love, or almost every other track she has released. Certainly, the odd Bush stan will love this cover, but most music fans will question its existence—instead of questioning their existence, which is what anyone who listens to "Rocket Man" should do.

Elton John - Rocket Man (Official Music Video)www.youtube.com

There are a few shining exceptions. The image of Bush conducting a symphony of planets and fireworks is aesthetically gorgeous, and the few moments where she does unleash a flood of reverb and harmonies (at the very ends of the choruses) hint at what could have been, and why it became a No. 12 hit in 1991. But for the most part, listeners will be stuck feeling deeply uncomfortable.


Eden Arielle Gordon is a writer and musician from New York. Follow her on Twitter at @edenarielmusic.


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