Queen II | Sheer Heart Attack | A Night at the Opera | A Day at the Races | News of the World | Jazz
The Game | Hot Space | The Works | A Kind of Magic | The Miracle | Innuendo
- Americans Hate Tingle: The band cross-dressing in the video for "I Want to Break Free" squicked out a lot of the band's American audience at the time, who were unaware the video was parodying Coronation Street. Alongside the backlash towards the disco sound on Hot Space and the band's Sun City performance in South Africa, the video was a major contributor to the band's prolonged decline from popularity in the States, not fully recovering until after Freddie Mercury's death in 1991.
- Broken Aesop: "Radio Ga Ga" is all about how music videos have led to an increased emphasis on the visual element of music at the expense of the auditory. The accompanying music video features lavish sets and costumes, footage from the film Metropolis and a montage of clips of music videos from earlier Queen songs. (The actual point of the video was to publicize and promote the restoration of Metropolis.)
- Harsher in Hindsight: "Hammer to Fall" really sounds as if it was written after Freddie Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS, the lyrics are eerily apt, but it was actually written a couple of years before he even contracted HIV. On top of that, it was written by Brian May, with the Cold War in mind. For an example of why people made this connection, the line "Build your muscles while your body decays" is actually about the superpowers wasting disproportionate amounts of money on military assets and nuclear bombs while their economies stagnate, but it takes on a whole new context when you know one of the symptoms of AIDS is atrophying muscle mass.
- Heartwarming in Hindsight: From "Radio Ga Ga". The scene where Freddie Mercury is standing in front of the clock and his band mates materialise in front of him and put their hands on their hips almost like guarding him. When Freddie was diagnosed with AIDS, his band mates did their best to shield him from media scrutiny, denying he was sick.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: "Radio Ga Ga", which came out right around the time when MTV was starting to take off and become a phenomenon, has one particular lyric: "So stick around, cause we might miss you when we grow tired of all this vision". Thirty years later, MTV hardly even plays music videos anymore, while Internet and satellite radio, allowing listeners access to countless songs and genres of music, have become wildly popular.
- Values Dissonance: The music video for "I Want to Break Free" centers around the band crossdressing as a parody of Coronation Street. While crossdressing had long been a staple of British comedy, it was far more scrutinized in the United States, which equated any sign of gender nonconformity with homosexuality, not helped by the massive resurgence in mainstream homophobia in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. Consequently, while the video was beloved in the UK, in the US, it quickly got banned from MTV and deepened the wound from the backlash towards Hot Space. This is commented on in Bohemian Rhapsody, where Freddie Mercury (acknowledged as bisexual in the film) notes that the homophobic response to the video in America turned a lot of people there against him specifically.
- Values Resonance: Like The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star", "Radio Ga Ga" was written as a commentary about the decline of the influence of radio as the primary mass medium in the late 70s/early 80s, getting overtaken by television. The line "Stick around, 'cause we might miss you when we grow tired of all this visual" is still hard-hitting in light of how the internet has overtaken both radio and television itself as the primary mass medium.
