There are dates that mark a simple anniversary and others that, in hindsight, reveal themselves as true turning points. October 31, 1975, is not Halloween night for the history of music. It is the day a six-minute meteorite crashed onto the radio airwaves, the charts, the very concept of a popular song. On that day, Queen, no longer just a simple English rock band but by then a factory of visions, released “Bohemian Rhapsody”. An act of calculated madness, an opera inside a 45 rpm that defied all market logic.

From the initial a cappella, a chorus of voices that seems to emerge from a dream or an abyss, to the melancholy, heart-wrenching ballad; from Brian May’s guitar solo, a lament and a battle cry all at once, to the operatic passage, a Wagnerian delirium for the masses, an orgy of vocalizations that shatters every rule; right to the final rock fury, a destructive catharsis that hurls you away like a hurricane. What the hell was it? It wasn’t rock, it wasn’t opera, it wasn’t pop. It was everything and nothing. The record company executives turned pale. The length was suicide. Radio stations refused to play it. It was Freddie Mercury who imposed his titanic will: “No cuts.” And then, with a stroke of genius, that sort of futuristic videoclip for “Top of the Pops” which, in the band’s absence on tour, became the only, hypnotic way to promote it. A video that carved the faces, the gestures, the atmospheres of that musical puzzle into the collective imagination.

The public, they understood, immediately and completely. No explanations were needed. It was instant infatuation, a contagion. The single, taken from the album “A Night at the Opera”, became a social phenomenon. It stayed at the top of the British charts for nine straight weeks, an eternity. It sold a million copies in two months, a dizzying number. People sang along, studied it, debated its meaning. Was it a prayer? A farewell to a mother? The confession of a murder? Mercury, a true artist, always refused to reveal the mystery. The ambiguity was the salt of his creation.

Then, sixteen years later, tragedy. The death of Freddie Mercury in November 1991 transformed “Bohemian Rhapsody” into something more than a song. It became an anthem, a requiem, a spiritual testament. Its re-emergence at the top of the charts, for another five weeks, was no longer just a commercial success. It was a collective weeping, a moving, thunderous farewell. A posthumous recognition of its prophecy. Today, decades later, that track hasn’t aged a bit, it hasn’t stopped astonishing. It is the third best-selling single of all time in the United Kingdom, a monument. It is not a song, it is a sonic continent. When that intro starts, time stops. And in those six minutes, lies the entire, boundless, fragile, and genius ambition of man to touch the sky with a finger, if only for the length of a record.