Look at how many bands/solo artists that are inspired by Freddie and I was just woundering what music would be like if he never entered music and just entered graphic design.
No right or wrong answers.
It'd be 99.99% the same in my opinion. Fred was brilliant, but he wasn't the only one. He was just another brick in the wall. Same for other musicians imo.
Queen's music is very hard to copy by other artists, IMO. You can play in The Beatles' style or in someone's other, but not in Queen's one, so if there wasn't Freddie not much would changes in the music.
But anyway after 'Barcelona' album the idea of 'rock meets opera' became very popular. And he did a lot of things for whole show-business.
Hotel California would replace Bohemian Rhapsody I think.
As the song that everyone goes on about all the time and tries to work it out and says how genius the whole thing is.
I think Freddie did make a massive difference to music, but I think it's difficult to say exactly what would have changed without him. I mean, we'd still have great frontmen, but would they be as good? We wouldn't know.
I don't think Barcelona is "rock meets opera" per se. I don't see the "rock" part. It's not an album you can label anyway.
IMO frontmen as great as Fred, there are several. Robert Plant for example. Some might prefer one or the other, but imo they're at the same level. Queen influenced many bands but it wasn't the only influence of any of them. GnR without Queen influences would lose only a slight part of their background. Even Axl - who is perhaps the biggest admirer of the band between them - wouldn't lose a very big part of his inspiration. First, even if he liked Queen a lot, he liked many more, so it's the brick in the wall point. Second, he'd never know about Freddie or Queen because they wouldn't exist. Therefore they wouldn't have been missed.
Hotel California is fairly basic for being such a big anomaly as Bo Rhap. They're equally great and lovable, but the "novelty" of Bo Rhap, besides being the (not really) first video, was the fact that it apparently broke all rules. Hotel California, on the other hand, even being long, didn't break any: Two contrasting sections (verse, which lasts sixteen measures, and middle-eight, which lasts... eight measures, duh), a crescendo intro (adding instruments bit by bit), diatonic driven harmony with ocassional parallels included (F# in the key of Bm), middle-eight beginning in one of the neighbour tones (G in this case), AA' phrasing in that section, etc.
Which would be studied as the ultimate clever meets catchy masterpiece? Perhaps Stairway, or Las Ketchup Song. Not to forget Mambo Number Five.
"Rock meets opera" - I meant rock-singer sings with opera-singer and there's no matter in which style they sing - I wrote about the whole idea of such duet.
About Robert Plant... If you ask ordinary people - who's not much into music or rock-music - they don't know who is Robert Plant, but they know who is Freddie Mercury, they've heard this name. I lived in USSR (the iron curtain etc. etc.) and people here knew who he was even before he died. That's a fact.