Never Too Late: Queen’s Logic of Practice

ABSTRACT

This paper theorizes on the grammar of relations that band members may develop when different members of the band can take on different responsibilities, when they might compose, sing, and play an instrument. It focuses on Queen because of the way that band’s members created a working environment that allowed for both personal and musical differences while nonetheless conforming to a “logic of practice.” To explore the dynamics of the band, the paper employs but also tests and critiques Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus.

KEYWORDS:

• Queen
• band dynamics
• song writing
• Pierre Bourdieu
• habitus
• empathy

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Jennifer Anne de Boer discusses Mercury’s “camp aesthetic” and the way it proved to be “disconcerting to rock critics” in On the Margins of the Mainstream (78).

2. The specific section of the poem reproduced here has also been published independently of the longer Idylls as “Late, Late, So Late” and “The Foolish Virgins.” Interestingly, it was also turned into a hymn.

3. As Ray Winkler demonstrates, the members of Queen took their image and the decision making that generates it very seriously; they were intimately involved in designing everything from their album covers to their light shows, always seeking to produce an artifact that was identifiably “Queenish.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rob Breton

Rob Breton is Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario, Canada. He is primarily a Victorianist who publishes on popular culture and working-class literatures. His latest book, The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction, was published by the Manchester University Press.