Killer Queen

"Killer Queen" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was their first big international hit, reaching number two in the UK and becoming their first US hit. Written by lead singer and pianist Freddie Mercury, it was featured on their third album Sheer Heart Attack and later appeared on the band's first compilation album, Greatest Hits.

The song is about a high-class call girl. It has been characterised as "Mercury’s piano-led paean to a Moët-quaffing courtesan". It has also been described by AllMusic as the true beginning of Queen's "radio sound" and "recalls the cabaret songs of yesteryear, but also shows how Queen was fast becoming a master of power pop". Rock historian Paul Fowles has written that "Killer Queen", with its "sleazy Parisian imagery", allowed "free rein" to Mercury's "unique brand of rock theater". The song won Mercury his first Ivor Novello Award.

Background and release

When released as a single, "Killer Queen" was Queen's breakthrough hit, reaching number two in the United Kingdom and number 12 in the United States. It was released as a double A-side in the UK, the US and Canada (where it reached number 15 in the RPM 100 national singles chart), with the song "Flick of the Wrist". In 1986, it was featured as the B-side to "Who Wants to Live Forever". The song marked a departure from the heavier material of the band's first two albums, as well as the beginning of a more stylistically diverse approach in songwriting. At the same time, "Killer Queen" retained the essence of Queen's trademark sound, particularly in its meticulous vocal harmonies. According to Q Magazine, Killer Queen's guitar solo is the 2nd best in all time.

Queen

A queen is a female monarch. Queen may refer to:

In government and monarchy

Radio Ga Ga

"Radio Ga Ga" is a 1984 song performed and recorded by the British rock band Queen, written by their drummer Roger Taylor. It was released as a single with "I Go Crazy" by Brian May on the original B-side (3:42) and was included on the album The Works. The song also features on the band's compilation albums, Greatest Hits II, and Classic Queen.

The single was a worldwide success for the band, reaching number one in 19 countries, number 2 in the UK Singles Chart, and number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. The band performed the song at every concert from 1984 to their last concert with their lead singer Freddie Mercury in 1986, with their most notable performance at Live Aid in 1985.

Meaning

Recorded in 1983 and released in January 1984, the song was a commentary on television overtaking radio's popularity and how one would listen to radio in the past for a favorite comedy, drama, or science fiction programme. It also pertained to the advent of the music video and MTV, which was now competing with radio as an important medium for promoting records. Ironically, Queen had done much to popularize the music video with "Bohemian Rhapsody" in 1975 and the video for "Radio Ga Ga" would become a regular staple on MTV in 1984. It was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award that year. Roger Taylor was quoted:

Don't Stop Me Now

"Don't Stop Me Now" is a song by the British rock band Queen, featured on their 1978 album Jazz that was released as a single in 1979. Written by lead singer Freddie Mercury, it was recorded in August 1978 at Super Bear Studios in Berre-les-Alpes (Alpes-Maritimes), France, and is the twelfth track on the album.

Musically the song builds on Mercury's piano playing, with Roger Taylor and John Deacon providing a bass guitar and drums backing track. The song also provides an example of Queen's trademark style of multitrack harmony vocals for the chorus lines.

On the studio version, Brian May's only guitar playing is in his guitar solo, but on live versions performed on the band's 1979 Jazz and Crazy tours, May would also play rhythm guitar throughout the rest of the song to give more of a rock feeling to it. A live version of the song features in the band's 1979 album Live Killers. The song also appears in the band's 1981 compilation album Greatest Hits, and in June 2011, as part of Queen's 40th anniversary celebrations, an old take of the song containing more guitar parts was included on the bonus EP of the re-released and remastered Jazz album.

Mystery meat navigation

Mystery meat navigation (also known as MMN) is a disparaging term coined in 1998 by Vincent Flanders, author and designer of the website Web Pages That Suck, to describe a web page where the destination of the link is not visible until the user points their cursor at it. Such interfaces lack a user-centered design, emphasizing aesthetic appearance, white space, and the concealment of relevant information over basic practicality and functionality.

The epithet "mystery meat" refers to the meat products often served in American public school cafeterias whose forms have been so thoroughly reprocessed that their exact types can no longer be identified by their appearances: like them, the methods of MMN are clear to the producer but baffling to the consumer.

Flanders originally and temporarily described the phenomenon as Saturnic navigation in reference to the Saturn Corporation, whose company website epitomized this phenomenon. Flanders writes, "The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons that are replaced with explicative text only when the mouse cursor hovers over them".