QueenZone discussion #1559426

The Real Wizard wrote: This past March there were THREE albums by Queen in the US Billboard top ten. They are definitely bigger now than they were in 1980. Like it or not, the film has made them the biggest band in the world. Enjoy it. Any Queen fan with their head screwed on straight is foolish not to.

The Real Wizard wrote: This past March there were THREE albums by Queen in the US Billboard top ten. They are definitely bigger now than they were in 1980. Like it or not, the film has made them the biggest band in the world. Enjoy it. Any Queen fan with their head screwed on straight is foolish not to.

k-m wrote: Gosh, Stick, what on Earth are you rambling about? Sales means popular, it's as simple as that.

matt z wrote: It's probably the hair. Brian went to his natural gray and then made a cyborg prop mask with the production crew. All the difference in the world Truly hard to believe ANOTHER WORLD was 1998 ....21 fucking years ago! Would be wonderful if he incorporated that CYBORG riff in his solo bit

mooghead wrote: What is Another World?

Stick wrote:

k-m wrote: Gosh, Stick, what on Earth are you rambling about? Sales means popular, it's as simple as that.

Well, as you can read in my previous post I don't necessarily think that popularity is the exact same as sales. They contribute to it but there is more to a band being popular among people than current new sales. Revitalized interest from people who already own the music, interest among people who dont buy the albums but still like the music a lot when heard through other sources etc. Popularity entails more in my opinion than just new records sold and that's why I think the concept is hard to really measure. Does that clarify the "ramblings"?

Michael Allred wrote: Jim Beach was thinking long term. All the ways Queen kept themselves in the public consciousness that fans HATED (reality shows and competitions, commercials, movies, the musical, compilation albums) allowed the band to survive all these years and the movie finally put them over the top. The tours with Rodgers and now Lambert have helped cement the whole thing. I credit Jim Beach.

The Real Wizard wrote:

Michael Allred wrote: Jim Beach was thinking long term. All the ways Queen kept themselves in the public consciousness that fans HATED (reality shows and competitions, commercials, movies, the musical, compilation albums) allowed the band to survive all these years and the movie finally put them over the top. The tours with Rodgers and now Lambert have helped cement the whole thing. I credit Jim Beach.

Bingo. They are everywhere in popular culture now. Countless kids are devouring the back catalog now - not just the greatest hits albums. QPL played the long game for the last 20 years, and it has finally paid off.

thomasquinn 32989 wrote: I think you're seeing a long-term strategy that was never really there - you can connect the dots after the fact, but I seriously doubt that, say, the 5ive-collaboration was meant as anything more long-term than "we might get a hit this year". Now, with Queen being on top, it might all look like a grand, long-term plan coming to fruition, but I find it much more likely that the examples cited were all intended to have short-term benefits, and the fortuitous long-term outcome that happened to occur many years later was simply a matter of luck. This kind of thing occurs in historiography all the time, and we have a word for it: "teleology", the idea that phenomena arise because of the purpose they serve, rather than arising from underlying, possibly less visible, causes. For anything that is happening in the present, you can draw a continuous string of events, causes if you will, leading up to it, but it would be a mistake to assume that all those events could only have led to the present outcome, or were even meant to produce that outcome. It's easy, perhaps even natural, to look at history that way, but it is deceptive.

PrimeJiveUSA wrote: "Biggest band in the world"? Shouldn't they be playing stadiums instead of arenas in America like The Stones are this summer?

gandorb wrote: The huge AIDS backlash was more toward the mid 80s than the early 80s as the general population didn't seem to get how serious it was until then. Culture Club definitely had a backlash, but perhaps that was due in part to the music. David Bowie presented as so hetero during that China Girl period that he hardly was going to provoke a backlash. Elton overall continued to experience on overall commercial decline here. It is hard to know what part of this was due to the music, homophobia or both.