Maybe it’s no coincidence that Jackson adapted a hard, percussive, freaked-out singing style of his own shortly thereafter. ![]() After all, with a song this disconnected and nonlinear, what else could the intent be? The members of Queen like to tell the story about Michael Jackson, backstage at a Queen show, advising the band to release “Another One Bites The Dust” as a single. This might be why some church groups thought Queen were using “Another One” to put out backwards-masked subliminal messages about smoking weed. He seems lost in the push-pull of the song’s beat, his words becoming half-nonsense exclamations. On “Another One Bites The Dust,” Freddie Mercury yips and howls and grunts. But “Another One” does present a toughness that most of Queen’s arena-rock peers weren’t even attempting at the time. There’s nothing outwardly rock about “Another One.” When the guitar isn’t making sound effects or echoing Deacon’s bass riff, it’s doing scratchy funk things. It presents tension as relief.īrian May’s sound effects - the rising drones, the echoing thunder booms, the ominous ripples - give “Another One” a weight and a presence, an almost cinematic mise en scène. “Another One Bites The Dust” presents tension and relief at the same time. But where disco was so often about exulting in your own personal euphoria, “Another One Bites The Dust” finds transcendence in fear and stress and violence. ![]() The metronomic insistence of the song helps it snap, and it’s certainly possible to imagine Mercury’s vocal as diva histrionics. Roger Taylor doesn’t really get any drum fills in. The Queen of “Another One” understand how disco operates. All it needs is Mercury spitting it out like it’s poison. The image of bullets ripping out of a doorway doesn’t really need context. Instead, the song works as a disconnected paranoid freakout, a breathless pant. In the third, the song becomes a sort of inspirational anthem about standing up against all the forces that are trying to bring you down. In the second, Mercury is pissed off after a breakup. The first verse is a short gangster-movie narrative. If you look at the “Another One Bites The Dust” lyrics on paper, they’re pretty dumb. What matters is the freaked-out knife-edge feeling that they conjure. The lyrics in the finished version are hard to make out, but that doesn’t matter. So he ditched his original lyrics, which were about being a cowboy, and wrote new ones for Mercury to sing. When Queen finished recording the song, Deacon was surprised at how hard it sounded. And Mercury sings hard over all of it, riding the beat while pushing his voice against it, using it as a percussive effect. Brian May made some of the sound effects, running his guitar through an effects processor called the Eventide Harmonizer. ![]() John Deacon played almost every instrument on “Another One”: Bass, lead and rhythm guitar, piano, percussion. Those songs are both brief toe-dip experiments in different genres, and yet both of them find ways to broadcast Freddie Mercury’s enormous, outsized personality all over the place. “Another One Bites The Dust” came from The Game, the 1980 album that had previously yielded “ Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” Queen’s other #1 single. That’s a credit to Queen, who took that dance-club sound and pushed it in a completely different direction. “Another One Bites The Dust” didn’t sound anything like any previous Queen song, but it didn’t really sound like Chic, either. If anything, the whole story only illustrates how much Chic defined the turn-of-the-decade moment when the disco era transitioned into the blockbuster ’80s dance-pop that followed. It’s a bit like the 1972 moment when America’s Neil Young imitation “ A Horse With No Name” knocked the actual Neil Young song “ Heart Of Gold” out of #1. ![]() In retrospect, it’s amazing that Queen replaced “ Upside Down,” the Diana Ross song that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards wrote and produced, at the #1 spot. That bassline would’ve been all over the radio in 1979.) Edwards didn’t mind that Queen had taken inspiration from his work, though he did get mad when some people suggested that Chic had stolen from Queen rather than vice versa. Taking to NME before his death, Bernard Edwards mentioned that John Deacon had been hanging around Chic’s studio before he wrote “Another One Bites The Dust.” (Of course, Deacon didn’t have to spend time in that studio to hear the “Good Times” bassline. Deacon’s hard-pulsing bass riff is the heart of “Another One Bites The Dust,” and it’s basically a version of Bernard Edwards’ descending bassline from Chic’s 1979 #1 “ Good Times.” Deacon’s version of the riff is simpler and less syncopated, but it’s the kind of thing that would’ve earned Chic a songwriting credit if it happened today. Specifically, “Another One Bites The Dust” is a variation on a riff from another song that had topped the charts a year before “Another One” made its ascent.
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