The Week in Queen (Conclusion)

I only heard one Queen song in the entire past week ("Somebody to Love" on 102.7 Jack FM, about 8:35 pm on Monday as I headed out to Target to buy more lights for the Christmas tree) which might be attributable to any number of things. Certainly one factor was changing the station on the sleep-aiding clock radio in the little girl's room, to an adult contempo station that basically never plays anything by Mr. Mercury's crew. There's also the reasonable expectation that some weeks are going to be well above average just as others are well below; you sit down at the roulette table betting on black enough times, sooner or later you're going to see it come up red ten times in a row. Plus there's the inevitable Christmas creep in this second full week of December, with the holiday music stations on both the commercial band and the satellite radio getting a lot of airings in our home and cars. But I also have to allow for the possibility that the universe is trying to tell me something about retiring this bit before it wears out its welcome (too late?) and who am I to argue?

So, ultimately and at the very least, I think I proved that I'm not crazy for thinking that I hear a lot of Queen without actively seeking it out. Maybe not every single day, but four or five times a week clearly qualifies as "a lot". (I also, in the process of paying close attention to the songs in the background for a month and a half, unscientifically determined that Billy idol and ZZ Top get ludicrous amounts of airplay as well.) And, as I think I've demonstrated in these posts, Queen deserves to be remembered and re-played because they made some great music. Maybe not life- or landscape-altering, but pretty great.

And in the course of this mini-project, I did a fair amount of research in the interest of fact-checking myself, and I did learn a few things. That always retroactively justifies energy expended as far as I'm concerned. As a parting example, and to bring things full-circle with the "Christmas creep" comment above, I updated my Christmas iPod playlist this weekend, and I added "Thank God It's Christmas" by Queen. This of course doesn't count as just happening to hear a Queen song, as I deliberately sought it out, but I'm not sure I would have done that if I hadn't been so highly focused on the band's legacy lately, which put "Thank God It's Christmas" on my radar screen.

So now I can go back to only half-listening to the radio and not have to stress about illuminating the various facets of Queen's discography with 500 new words a week through the holidays. But it was fun to have a specifically musical theme to keep up with for a while there, so I wouldn't rule out the possibility of something similar coming into rotation in the new year. We shall see!