Posted on 05/13/2011 9:55:15 PM PDT by tlb
WASILLA — When members of Wasilla High School’s symphonic jazz choir heard Friday it wouldn’t be singing the popular Queen hit “Bohemian Rhapsody” at this year’s graduation ceremony after working on it all year, the students couldn’t get their heads around it.
WHS Principal Dwight Probasco reportedly had received complaints from at least one parent that the 1975 hit written by Freddie Mercury wasn’t appropriate for the ceremony simply because Mercury was gay.
“The whole thing was just ridiculous,” senior Rachel Clark said Monday. “They’d played the song on the school intercom and we played it at prom.”
Choir member Casey Hight, a junior, was angry enough to contact a gay and lesbian support organization in Anchorage. They told her to contact the American Civil Liberties Union.
“I felt like the school was discriminating for sexual orientation and I felt it was wrong,” Hight said Monday. “It’s so stupid because there’s nothing sexual in the song. There aren’t even any cuss words.”
Although Probasco wouldn’t comment on the issue Monday, Senior Class Advisor Deb Haynes said Probasco has now agreed to allow the choir to sing an edited version of Bohemian Rhapsody that doesn’t include lyrics in one section about killing a man.
“The kids had put a lot of time into the song, but at graduation we really try to accommodate anything that might be a sensitive issue for anybody,” Haynes said, adding she didn’t understand why the song would have been a problem in the first place. “I’ve heard it a hundred times and it’s never bothered me.”
Hight said she believes Probasco decided to put the song back on the graduation program because he didn’t want any problems with the ACLU.
“We were joking about singing Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind,’ instead,” Clark said.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontiersman.com ...
Leave it to some folks who still know what it is to love God and America, and what it was that made us the greatest nation on the entire face of the earth in the history of all mankind!
This country has been sliding downhill ever since the first naughty poofters started thinking it was okay to come out of the closet. Once they were allowed to actually have "Gay Pride" (!?) parades in public, it was clear we were a tick of the clock away from Armageddon.
Leave it to Wasilla to remind us of what it means to have a pair. Thank God for Wasilla Alaska!
8^D
Funny that you should bring up Wayne's World.
After the operetta part when it breaks back into rock, I ALWAYS do the headbanging when in my car. I also do the air drums like Wayne. I have a small hatchback car (not quite the Mirthmobile), so I'm sure I look completely ridiculous.
Gotta have fun.
I loved this song when it came out in the late ‘70. It wasn’t a big hit, just a song you would hear on FM radio once in a while in its entirety—AM radio always edited it for time—and you would think, “What a cool song.”
And then Wayne’s World came out then everyone heard it a million times and fell in love with it and it RUINED it. Now when it comes on the radio I usually turn the channel.
A graduation song?Seems innapropriate, especially with grandma and grandpa in the audience.
Well, it COULD be gayer. Y.M.C.A. or In The Navy anybody?
Like it or hate it, the arts world has long been known for a place where homos, out or not, congregated. If you watched Hollywood, you were watching homos even if they didn’t carry on like homos on screen. Society was happy enough with this kind of detente, you keep your gayness to yourselves and we’ll pretend it’s not there. This boundary of respect gradually wore away. Now the love which once didn’t dare speak its name won’t shut up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJ3JE7cE3g
-PJ
Grandpa and grandma would probably think it’s opera, but who knows.
Excellent assessment. Sounds like a trumped up situation to me.
He was special.
Or Turbo Lover.
It isn’t Palin they’re worried about. It’s that she’ll unite the white’s before we’re overwhelmed by immigration and birth-rates. For some reason we’re just supposed to take it.
That song just gets more annoying with age.
Queen wasn’t gay-themed. Certainly not at the time, whatever other people may have made up later. And I don’t see that their music was gay either.
Its themes seem perfectly innocuous, particularly within their genre. There are plenty of bands that were much more controversial. For that matter there is plenty of classical music, particularly opera, that is far more morally compromised.
Freddy Mercury himself did not advertise himself as gay, nor was he any sort of gay activist. He did not flaunt his gayness that I know of.
For a time Freddy would wear the outrageous leather outfits, just like Rob Halford did. Most people back then were pretty naive of the gay connotations of it.
Why was it Queen and not King?
One of Queen’s earliest songs was called, “My Fairy King.”
I think the gay connotations came later.
The gay “culture” has a way of appropriating things, like the word “gay” in fact, and making them otherwise unusable.
“The Koln Concert” is one of the most amazing discs ever, hard to believe that was all improvised.
Curses - foiled again. (Dang internet thingy!)
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