God Save My Queen: A Tribute

By Daniel Nester

Book Overview

God Save My Queen is a collection of lyrical essays drawing on a very unliterary source: the British rock band Queen. World famous in the 1970s for such songs as "We Will Rock You," "We Are The Champions," "Another One Bites The Dust," and "Bohemian Rhapsody," Queen's music is embedded in our public consciousness, in our sports stadiums, in TV commercials, and Wayne's World.But it is a source of a deeper obsession for the author, poet and journalist Daniel Nester--in God Save My Queen, a short essay or riff accompanies, in order of album and track, every song recorded by the band, in chronological order, until its flopped "disco" album, 1982's Hot Space. Part memoir, part prose poetry part rock book, Nester draws connections betwen everyone from Liza Minelli, Leni Riefenstahl, Billie Jean King, Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury sharing a kiss in 1981, even a rant on Courtney Love's giggling over Kurt Cobain's mention of Freddie Mercury in his suicide note. The entries for the songs add up to a love letter to a band, and a time when all that mattered was a record player and a pair of headphones.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1887128271
• ISBN13: 9781887128278
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press
• Length: 140 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.1" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

a kind of magic...

This book is amazing. Any Queen fan who has felt at some point some surreal connection with the band will benefit greatly from reading this and its companion. It puts into words the abstract forms of things I'd never thought to try and describe. Parts of it brought tears to my eyes; parts of it made me laugh out loud. There are few things I can say that express what the book is, let alone its greatness. In any case, it is not a fan biography; it isn't a review; it is simply a genre in itself as something completely unique from anything else I've ever read. And it rocks.

An edgy new art form

Daniel Nester is an obsessed fan. Nothing strange there - lots of music books are written by fans. The difference is that Nester - also a New York poet - takes his fandom seriously; he considers it a suitable topic for poetry. And why not? Post-baby-boomers tend to define themselves by their cultural affiliations - whether you like the Smiths or System of a Down, pop taste articulates your personality, your stance towards the world. Nester's prose poems - one for every Queen song - go well beyond the traditional tribute. They explore the odd, obsessive mindset of the fan, the curious distance and closeness he feels towards his chosen object. The poems are madly associative in the Beat tradition but also toy with a pedantic scholarly bent, particularly in the hilarious footnotes. This bold work deserves to be read and discussed.

This book is a must!

I believe that any music obsessive can always identify another. Just by casually glancing at this book I immediately recognized the author as a genuine fanatic. But the book isn't merely the ramblings of a Queen junkie (that would hardly be enough). It is a carefully crafted trip down the author's own memory lane with Queen as the singular, all-consuming soundtrack. The result is so infectious that I could hardly believe that I was anxious to read it again (rare for a book of poetry). It also made me anxious to revisit the Queen canon. A perfectly fitting tribute to a great (and sometimes underrated) band.

Cool and strange

I'm a Queen fan, so I went online to look for a few books about the band, and I found this. I'm not really into poetry, but this book rocked. There were a few times I laughed out loud when I was reading it. This guy is funny and sincere. I'm 30, and there was something about this book that reminded me of when I was 12 or 13 and first getting into music. It's more about being a weirdo teenager than anything else. I really liked it. Also, it's the size of a 45, which is cool.

Totally unexpected and wonderful!

I loved this book! These short pieces have an impressive breadth--the copious footnotes reference everything from a WWII era letter from the author's grandfather, to the guitarist Brian May's Phd thesis. Captures the singular obsession of fandom and the desire to write this peculiar catelogue of knowledge into one's own biography. A personal allegory for a media-driven consumer age. Not what I expected, but very cool indeed!