Queen and Philosophy: Guaranteed to Blow Your Mind: Guaranteed to Blow Your Mind

Queen and Philosophy: Guaranteed to Blow Your Mind is a collection of cutting-edge philosophical essays on the rock group Queen, founded in 1970 and originally featuring lead vocalist Freddie Mercury. Queen’s reputation and fan following continue to grow in the twenty-first century.

These insightful and provocative chapters include:

● uncover the origins of Queen’s unique style in prog rock, vulgarity, and lower versus higher Romanticism

● examine Queen’s view of love and friendship

● draw upon three timeless Queen songs, ＂We Will Rock You,＂ ＂We Are the Champions,＂ and ＂Don’t Stop Me Now＂ and Socrates’s behavior in the Apology, to understand the ＂rocking＂ nature of philosophy

● identify the connections between ancient matriarchal religion and Queen’s love for strong female imagery

● explore how Brian May’s astrophysics brings to bear the issues of absolute versus relative spacetime and how the philosophies of Newton, Mach, and Einstein contribute to Queen’s creative output

● analyze the structure of Queen’s sound to answer the inevitable question, How can four people make all that music?

● expose what Queen’s songs tell us about the contemporary theory of mental illness and therapy

● scrutinize Roger Taylor’s stark impressions of ordinary life and death, and their alignment to the cynical musings of Diogenes of Sinope and Seneca’s blunt observations on the shortness of life

● look at the movie Highlander through the music of Queen and reveal how both song and cinema convey the philosophy of bushido, the soul of the samurai

Jared Kemling, a philosophy instructor at Rend Lake College, is editor of The Cultural Power of Personal Objects (2021).

Randall E. Auxier, professor of philosophy and communication studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, is author of numerous works including As Deep as It Gets: Movies and Metaphysics (2022) and Metaphysical Graffiti: Deep Cuts in the Philosophy of Rock (2017).