Freddie Mercury
Mr.BadGuy

When I think of 1985, the year this work was released, I didn't know Mr. Mercury, I was just 7 years old. In my childhood memories, 1985 was the gloomy atmosphere that reigned at home when, on "Mixer," people tried to understand what the hell this virus was that was affecting lustful, party-loving, and wealthy gays, depriving them of their sparkling lives, noisy friends, endless parties, dragging them to bruised hospital beds, while sudden pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma literally ate them alive.

How can one forget the images of a San Francisco so damn beautiful yet sad, while its streets were filled with men trying to hide from the world in the height of summer their faces and bodies full of purplish spots? And what does all this have to do with a Freddie Mercury album, you might ask. It matters, very much.

Heartbreaking loves doomed to a short life. Cheerful friends from morning to night, glasses of champagne between a disco and a nightclub. Alcohol and drugs taken a bit out of boredom, a bit for fun. A dependence on total and irreversible love. Lucid madness. Transgression. Sweetness. All this was Freddie, and this album is his rightful child. Musical wonders and limits coincide, perhaps they are mirror images, sliding between tracks like "Foolin' around" and "My love is dangerous"; they are simply light, exorcising the darkest thoughts of the man whose nature was the quintessence of exaggeration. But never superficial. The poignant gaiety of "Made in Heaven" and the very sad "I was born to love you," projections of the feelings of the man and artist Mercury who had everything from life, but perhaps nothing.

Dance-pop rhythms, power-pop, a bit of rock and a bit of lyrical farce ("Man made Paradise" and the track that titles the album); a carnival as self-parodic as it is human ("Living on my own"), a voice that scrapes the soul like a man burning alive for a love sung so many times but perhaps never lived ("Love me like there's no tomorrow"). The insidious disease that was horridly greeted with sadistic glee by an army of moralists who would later mourn their drug-addicted children victims of the system, had at least its inevitable reason. Ever so romantic. It turned Mercury into an icon of his and our time, sparing an artist as courageous and dignified as him the boredom and gray melancholy of old age.

A voice as hard as diamond set in a whirlwind of sensations, memories, escapes, and returns, of withered and consumed loves like this vinyl. Because Freddie was just like that, he never cheated. He never claimed to change the world, but he was never ashamed to show himself to the world for who he really was. This is why you were unique, Mr. Bad Guy.