Bohemian Rhapsody: History and Key Facts

"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by British rock band Queen from their fourth studio album, A Night at the Opera. The lead single from the album, it is a suite composed of five main elements: an introduction, a ballad, an opera, a hard rock segment, and a reflective coda. Released in 1975, it is one of the few progressive rock songs of the 1970s to reach a mainstream audience and is now regarded as the band's signature song.

Written by the band's lead singer, Freddie Mercury, he referred to "Bohemian Rhapsody" as a "mock opera" that resulted from the combination of three songs he had written. It was recorded by Queen and co-producer Roy Thomas Baker at five studios between August and September 1975. Due to recording logistics of the era, the band had to bounce the tracks across eight generations of 24-track tape, meaning that they required nearly 200 tracks for overdubs.

The promotional video is credited with furthering the development of the music video medium. It has appeared in numerous polls of the greatest songs in popular music, including a ranking at number 17 on Rolling Stone's 2021 list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time". A Rolling Stone readers' poll also ranked Mercury's vocal performance in the song as the greatest in rock history.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks (plus another five weeks following Mercury's death in 1991) and is the UK's third best-selling single of all time. It also topped the charts in countries including Canada where it spent two weeks at the top position, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and has sold over six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the song peaked at number nine in 1976, but reached a new peak of number two after appearing in the 1992 film Wayne's World. In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Following the release of the 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century. In 2021, it was certified diamond in the US for combined digital sales/streams equal to 10 million units. In 2022, it was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

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