Dr. Brian May on Freddie Mercury's creativity | Hacker News Reader

Dr. Brian May on Freddie Mercury's creativity

googleblog.blogspot.com

138 pointspatrickaljord15 comments

He's signing the article as:

Dr. Brian May, CBE. Guitarist.

As in: Doctor Brian May with a PhD in astrophysics from the Imperial College London, Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Guitarist of Queen.

It can't get cooler than that.

"... I was very poor & the thought of a Stratocaster was way out of my price range. So me and my Dad took it into our hands to make the guitar... It took about 2 years and we made it from all sorts of scraps and pieces ..."

Brian May is no slouch either. The link is a quick 1992 interview describing how his Dad built their own TV and how they both built the Red guitar you see him play. cf: @neilmurraybass, "Brian May guitar 1992" ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPD7_hQk7hk

My favorite Brian May fact is that, as soon as he had a few years off from being a legendary rock star, he went back to grad school and finished his doctorate in astrophysics.

Yeah, I love that one of my favorite guitarists has a PhD in Astrophysics. It's just cool.

I thought this kind of attitude would appeal to anyone building a startup:

"Freddie was fully focused, never allowing anything or anyone to get in the way of his vision for the future. He was truly a free spirit. There are not many of these in the world. To achieve this, you have to be, like Freddie, fearless—unafraid of upsetting anyone's apple cart.

To create with Freddie was always stimulating to the max. He was daring, always sensing a way to get outside the box. Sometimes he was too far out ... and he'd usually be the first to realise it. With a conspiratorial smile he would say "Oh ... did I lose it, dears?!" But usually there was sense in his nonsense—art in his madness. It was liberating. I think he encouraged us all in his way, to believe in our own madness, and the collective mad power of the group Queen."

I appreciate you sharing this; it was sweet. But there's something disturbing in the way you're framing it.

Have we lost perspective to the point where even the basic notions of how to live one's life have to be seen through the lens of a hacker working on a startup?

I say this as a hacker, working on a startup. When I'm done with my IE7 hacks, and I figure out why my production server isn't behaving like my dev server, I might take a moment to re-read that article and play some Queen, so I can fix my mind's eye on that beautiful human being who died too young.

> Have we lost perspective to the point where even the basic notions of how to live one's life have to be seen through the lens of a hacker working on a startup?

Absolutely not, I just posted that because people tend to complain about posts that are not related enough to the hacker/startup world here so I anticipated that complain by posting that.

I think bands are one of the most common startups. You can learn a lot from successful bands. They sell a product, a potentially life changing product and they often do it with little more than a dream, some talent and a million people against them.

I don't get why Google posponed showing their Freddie doodle (quite awesome btw) until Sep. 6th in the US. "Out of respect for Labor Day?" Why does Labor day require that kind of respect? I'd absolutetly understand a Memorial Day hiatus. Is it because it's Freddie Mercury? I recall a Charles Schulz birthday doodle with Snoopy on Thanksgiving. Just confused here...

Snoopy is synonymous with Thanksgiving because of the Charlie Brown movie, "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving".

Labor Day is celebrating workers, hard-won worker rights etc. I personally like that Google is respecting this by delaying showing Freddie's celebration a day.

More cynically, Labor Day is a day off from work, so Americans are usually barbecuing with their families and enjoying the last bit of summer rather than sitting inside and using the internet. They would have a bit more exposure waiting until Americans were back to work.

There is a long and contentious, but mostly forgotten, history of laborers' rights in the United States.

These events in history were at times violent and bloody confrontations. Labor Day, to those with knowledge of this history, is a day of reconciliation and reverence.

Really? I thought September Labor Day was a day created to erase the memory of the Haymarket Massacre by discouraging workers from commemorating it on Real Labor Day, which in the US was instead called Americanization Day, Loyalty Day, and then Law Day, specifically in order to marginalize the people struggling for laborers' rights.

Initially I thought you were correct, but September Labor Day actually predates the Haymarket affair by four years.

"The first big Labor Day in the United States was observed on September 5, 1882, by the Central Labor Union of New York." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day

You're right. Thanks for the correction! It does look like Red-phobia played a role in keeping the September date, but it was trade unions that chose it initially.

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