2014, p.476). Mercury’s construction of his own identity indicates that ethnicity can be constructed. On the other hand, the paleness of his skin, associated with Western ethnicity, no doubt aided this transition and thus this will not be true of all cases of immigration. Furthermore, he attended a boarding school in India which was styled like school systems in Britain so his education had been influenced by the English and this would have also assisted a quick adaption to a British lifestyle. Nevertheless, it shows that Mercury favoured the Western image and ensured that he publicly lost suggestions of his original background. Due to the perception of Asian culture in the 1960s, Mercury adopted British culture as if he had always belonged in this community in order to be musical accomplished in the Western world. But by doing this, it indicates that British heritage had more of an appeal than his traditional roots. As a result, neither the Parsi or Asian community are represented in the image of Mercury which correlates with Barber’s prediction of a future homogenised place. The result of this theory would be that all culture would lose their cultural heritage in favour of a westernised image in order to be materially successful.
Performing ‘Glam’: Queen’s image
Mercury would watch Brian May and Roger Taylor, who he met at university, play in the band Smile and comment on their performances saying “it’s great how you use this light and shade [...] you are aware of building up atmospheres and bringing them down and stuff […] but you’re not dressing right […] you’re not addressing the audience
properly”(May, 2000, The Untold Story). This shows that from the start of the friendship it was obvious that Mercury knew how to construct a performance. At the beginning of Mercury’s collaboration with May and Taylor, he showed the vision he wanted to have for the band by suggesting that they call themselves ‘Queen’. He said that this name was “regal” (Hoskyns, 1998, p.100) demonstrating that he wanted them to be associated with the monarchy, an old institution in Britain. This association with such a historic British symbol shows that Mercury wanted the band to become synonymous with this geographical location instead of his Asian roots. Moreover, he also decided to rename himself ‘Freddie Mercury’ and lose his former name Bulsara to westernise himself. This action reveals that he did not want to be represented as ‘exotic’ or ‘othered’ (Donnell, 2002, p.208) by the media.
Another way the band aligned themselves with British culture was by adopting a musical performance that was taking over England at the time – glam rock. The musical movement ‘was all about stardom […] allied to artifice and the trash aesthetic [… it] called into question received notion of truth and authenticity, especially in the area of sexuality [blurring] the divide between straights and queers’ (Auslander, 2006, p.6). It was a genre therefore that accepted ambiguity. Costumes were used to play a role, the perfect genre for Mercury’s true identity to remain unquestioned. Hoskyns (1998) argues that the theatrics of glam rock means that performance studies are integral to the analysis of the genre. He separates the performer into ‘three layers: the real person (the performer as human
Figure 3. Click on the video to play
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This video is of a performance of Queen's song 'Liar'. The long hair, polished nails, necklaces, floaty sleeves and sequins are all part of a costume for this glam rock performance. The feminine associations with these details gives the performance a sexual ambiguity.