Was It All Worth It? Queen in the 1980s

Abstract

Queen’s albums in the 1980s were received with mixed reactions by critics, and such reactions present a clear historiographical narrative: a downturn with Hot Space, followed by a return to mediocre hard rock from The Works onwards. This chapter considers how the themes of these receptions relate to musical details. It is argued that the disparaging of Hot Space rests on Queen altering the instrumental structures of their songs compared with their idiolect of the previous decade. By comparison, the later albums return to this sound-world, but with repetitive harmonic and rhythmic formulae, such that there is a lack of variety in the newer hard rock songs. The chapter closes with a reading of the 1989 track ‘Was It All Worth It?’ which aims to emulate a ‘classic’ Queen song from the 1970s, but appears jumbled and structurally incoherent, an apt metaphor for the band in the 1980s.