For Fans of A Night at the Opera

The six-minute centrepiece is the obvious answer, but the song that most completely captures what this album is doing is "'39". Brian May wrote it as a sci-fi acoustic ballad about time dilation, sang it in a country register, and placed it between a music-hall comedy number and a ballad about a killer. It is ridiculous. It is also perfect. The album's ambition lies not in its big moments but in its absolute refusal to sort things into genres or moods. Everything belongs, and the seams show on purpose.

Cameron Crowe's 2000 film is set in 1973, two years before the Opera, but it captures the specific fever of discovering that music can be the most important thing in your life. The scene on the tour bus where everyone spontaneously sings "Tiny Dancer" is not about that Elton John song; it is about the feeling that a great piece of pop can suspend disbelief and make strangers into a community for two minutes and forty seconds. That is exactly what Bohemian Rhapsody did on the radio in 1975.

Pink Floyd released The Wall in 1979, four years after the Opera, and it is the sound of the same ambitions pushed to the point of self-destruction. Where Queen kept their maximalism playful and alive, The Wall uses the same multi-tracked vocals, the same orchestral arrangements, the same concept-album architecture to describe what happens when spectacle becomes a prison. The two records are in conversation across four years of rock history, and knowing both of them changes how you hear each one.

Baz Luhrmann's 2001 film does to movie musicals what Queen did to rock albums: it takes a form with established rules and refuses every single one of them, substituting an overwhelming surplus of style, feeling, and anachronism. The mash-up of pop songs from multiple decades, the costumes, the doomed romance played completely straight inside an absurdist setting: Moulin Rouge! operates on the same logic as Bohemian Rhapsody, which is that if you commit fully enough to the bit, the audience will follow you anywhere.