Just been listening to Queen's Innuendo. I now have all of Queen's albums apart from Flash. There are a few artists and bands I have most of their album catalogue: Queen, Kate Bush, Jean-Michel Jarre (and E.L.O. by chance, as Simon gave me his whole collection). I don't have all of any one artist, perhaps one or two albums missing. I did have all of Kate's, for example, but I disliked The Director's Cut so gave it away, and I dislike the drippy and passionless 50 Words For Snow, though I still have it in a paper sleeve of shame.
I digress. Innuendo is great album. Perhaps Queen's best, for several reasons. Primarily it's dominated by and suffused with Freddie Mercury's emotion. An expansive joy, a cry, not present in other work apart from his Barcelona. It's joy, but you can hear that it's a mask of his facing death, anguish and joy in an electric embrace. There's little like it in my collection, perhaps Strauss' Four Last Songs or the Beethoven's Late Quartets. I've not heard a vocal performance like it, again, apart from in Barcelona, the overwhelmingly saddest song I've yet heard.
What a joy it is to listen on CD too. Streaming is awful (I've never listened to an album by stream; apart from anything else, I don't have a device to do this with apart my huge desktop PC). For me, streaming has killed music, handed British culture (and indeed much of America) to a minority of super-rich American tech corporations who are culturally vacant and bleed their philosophy of addiction and greed into the world's minds, into the soul of the young and poor everywhere. If I were Queen, if I could meet Roger Taylor or Brian May, I'd ask them to take down all of their music from streamers and sell only on CD. Piracy, which was one of the main reasons for streaming at all, is less of a problem now because it's easily detected on the major channels; the very streaming architecture does this automatically. When pirated in secret, it's the same as it ever was. I'd ask Roger, ask Brian, to buy a CD player company, and team up with other bands to sign a stream-free pledge, form a collective of like minds to wrestle culture back.
Buy, sigh, even I don't do this. Streaming is, just about, my only audience. Hardly anyone buys my music on CD, I don't think any album has ever sold as many as 10 copies over the past 27 years. Many friends don't even have a CD player. My own philosophy would kill my personal expression. Alas. Alas.
My stomach is fine now. The magic bullet of Solgar's digestive enzymes has allowed me to eat totally normally in an astonishing way, an about-face to what is so often a struggle.
Onwards we slowly march. Head held high. Head held low. Onwards to the setting sun. Onwards to the rising sun. See, our rock-of-art awaits. Hello my rock friend. Hello again.
