AVENGED SEVENFOLD's JOHNNY CHRIST Calls QUEEN's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' 'A Musical Masterpiece For Songwriting'

During an appearance on a recent episode of "The Mistress Carrie Podcast", AVENGED SEVENFOLD bassist Johnny Christ praised QUEEN's 1975 classic "Bohemian Rhapsody", which embraces a lot of musical styles within its six distinct sections without a chorus — an intro, a ballad segment, a guitar solo an operatic passage, a hard rock part, and a reflective outro coda — all within six short minutes. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "That song, it takes you on such a journey. Let's just start with the structure — when you break it down, the structure of the song is so unique that when you listen to it, you think it's this long 10-minute song because it takes you through such a journey and such a path, when you look back, it's only been about four and a half minutes. And that's not that long of a song, in my opinion, for how much it goes around and has so many extreme changes but are seamless. You've got the rock parts, you've got the choir parts, you've got the piano parts, and these are three different sections. It starts out as a ballad, and then it gets into all these things. It's a musical masterpiece for songwriting. And then let's not even get into the melodies on top of everything — not just the structure, [but] the melodies, the choir work that they recorded themselves on top of it. It's a perfectly written song, in my opinion."

This past December, "Bohemian Rhapsody" crossed the threshold of two billion streams on Spotify. The news came less than two years after the QUEEN classic was officially certified diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA),representing 10 million or more in sales and stream equivalents in the United States.

QUEEN was the first British band in music history to earn the diamond song award.

This was the latest in a long line of extraordinary achievements for "Bohemian Rhapsody", which was QUEEN's first Top 10 hit in the U.S. In the U.K., it went to No. 1 for 9 consecutive weeks, a record at the time, before returning to the top of the charts again in 1991. It was named the most-streamed song of the 20th century and its companion video passed one billion views on YouTube, making history as the first pre-1990s video to reach one billion views on the platform. In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and Freddie Mercury's vocal performance was named by the readers of Rolling Stone magazine as the best in rock history.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" is also one of the many QUEEN hits featured on the band's blockbuster compilation "Platinum Collection, Vol. 1-3", which was certified five times platinum. This blockbuster compendium, which hit No. 6 on the Billboard 200, features tracks like "Another One Bites The Dust", "Killer Queen", "Under Pressure", "We Will Rock You", "We Are The Champions" and so many more.

QUEEN remains one of the most popular groups in the world today, transcending multiple generations of fans, a position further buoyed by the phenomenal global success of their Academy Award-winning 2018 biographical film "Bohemian Rhapsody", which tells the incredible story of the band's historic career and quickly became the highest grossing music biopic in history.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" was first released as a single on October 31, 1975. Despite its unconventional structure and exorbitant length for a single, it became QUEEN's first Top 10 hit in the U.S. In the U.K., it went to No. 1 for nine consecutive weeks, a record at the time. The song revisited the charts 16 years later, when it appeared in the 1992 comedy "Wayne's World", starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey.