Freddie Mercury
November is a big month for Queen fans, with the anniversary of A Night at the Opera’s release coming just three days before the anniversary of lead singer Freddie Mercury’s untimely death. Indeed, Mercury has been the face of the band since its inception in 1970, drawing praise from critics and fans for his memorable and rare four-octave vocal range.
Towards the end of his life, he also gained a reputation as an activist and LGBTQ+ icon, and he has posthumously become one of the most important celebrities of all time for raising awareness of AIDS. But while much of Mercury’s life has become public knowledge—including his sexuality and intimate relationships—one aspect of his inner world remains obscured: his cultural background. Although Mercury is considered a British musician and was even voted as one of BBC’s 100 Greatest Britons, he faced great prejudice and xenophobia his entire life. As a Brown immigrant man, he was far from the blueprint of the “ideal” English rock star, especially amidst the violent waves of racist, anti-immigrant sentiment that swept the United Kingdom from the late 1960s through the 1980s. In order to achieve success, Mercury had to obscure his own ethno-cultural identity—an aspect of the singer that remains pushed aside even today. Freddie Mercury Began His Career in the UK Marked by Racism and Xenophobia Freddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara on September 5, 1946, in Zanzibar, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Tanzania. His family was Parsi-Indian—a distinct ethnic group that traces its origins back to Persian Zoroastrians who migrated to India around the 7th century. Mercury’s father had been stationed in Zanzibar with the British Colonial Service but fled in 1964 amid the Zanzibar Revolution and settled in a London suburb. It was an inauspicious time for the Bulsara family to emigrate. 1964 happened to be the first recorded time that the ethnic slur “Paki” was used in the United Kingdom against people of Southeast Asian descent. As Asian immigrants increasingly moved to the UK, racism and xenophobia increased, resulting in violent far-right gangs that engaged in “Paki-bashing,” or targeted attacks against Southeast Asian individuals—or ultimately anyone visibly Brown. The government was no help, either: In 1968, Conservative Shadow Defence Secretary Enoch Powell gave a now-infamous speech in which he said that Black and Asian immigration would result in violence, opining, “like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” A Gallup opinion poll found that 74 percent of Britons agreed with these sentiments. It's no wonder that Mercury felt unsafe using his real name. He’d replaced “Farrokh” with “Freddie” while in boarding school—no doubt in order to fit in better—and by the time Queen formed in 1970, he’d swapped “Bulsara” for “Mercury.” And while some biographical projects, such as the 2018 Rami Malek film Bohemian Rhapsody, touch on Mercury’s tense relationship with his cultural identity, few truly acknowledge the life-or-death circumstances that led him to hide it. At a time when racist murders rendered Southeast Asians afraid to leave their homes, it’s no wonder that Mercury opted for an anglicized name before committing to a life in the limelight. He was forced to honor his heritage and practice his religion privately, with most fans discovering his background only after he opted for a traditional Zoroastrian funeral. Freddie Mercury Didn’t Fit the Traditional British Rock-Star Image The music industry was no sanctuary from the bias Mercury faced in everyday life. In Lesley-Ann Jones’ biography, Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury,” she writes that when Queen was formed, “a rock star, by definition, was ideally American,” with white Americans being the “favorite” and Black Americans being “almost as good.” British rock stars, however, were expected to be white in the vein of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. Consequently, an artist named Farrokh Busara had no place in the rock world, with his immigrant family, complex origins, and Eastern religion. If this were a different, more open-minded world, Mercury could have found creative means of incorporating his Parsi-Indian roots into his music, which would have made Queen’s music even more interesting than it already was. Carlos Santana, for instance, incorporated Spanish lyrics and Mexican rhythms into rock, and Shakira set herself apart in Latin pop by expressing her Lebanese roots through belly dance and Arab melodies. Melding seemingly disparate elements only makes music more textured and interesting, and Mercury’s forced anglicization stifled Queen’s potential as much as it did Mercury’s public image. It’s not enough to make brief nods to xenophobia or racist taunts, or to dismiss Mercury’s identity shift as a mere stage name. Rather, rock fans and historians need to acknowledge the severe racism and xenophobia that infected both the music industry and society at large, driving Mercury to keep his ethno-cultural identity out of the spotlight. Furthermore, we need to reckon with the travesty that, because of rampant small-mindedness, some people possess the freedom to be their full selves to a greater extent than others.
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