According to some theories of everyday life, diversions are most fully and effectively more than diversions — and become powers for changing one’s life — when they are “only” diversions. In that spirit, I offer a diversion for those here in the States celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday this weekend, and our global compatriots who find their own reasons for respite.

Here are five versions of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”: the original; the version from the movie “Wayne’s World”; a remake by Suzie McNeil; a take by the Muppets; and a lip-synch video by some teenage girls in the late ’80s that I found on YouTube. The Wayne’s World, McNeil and Muppet versions show how corporate brokers of cinematic/televisual culture fashion rock for specific audiences (North American adolescent teens and young adults in spirit or letter, and children). The fifth shows the creativity and playful spirit with which pop rhapsodies often get reworked by fans, setting a song with ostensibly disturbing lyrics in the family living room and making domestic items the tinsel of transcendence.

Is this “progression” of rhapsodies a process of dilution, of different interpretation, of genuinely new invention, or more? The question of how one creatively represents rhapsody, bohemian or otherwise, is one that implicates theology, and in which theology once thought it specialized.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Spam Protection by WP-SpamFree