Customer Reviews

God Save My Queen: A Tribute

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4 star:		(3)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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!

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.

I came of age (and to music) around the same time as the author. My band of choice was the Canadian art power trio RUSH. The band QUEEN was right up there, though, and I was as sad as any other fan to learn of the band's premature demise and lead singer Freddie Mercury's tragic death.

Daniel Nester writes clearly and well. He fuses a fan's energy with the full power and importance of QUEEN, both as a musical and pop culture phenomena. Each QUEEN song receives a careful treatment that combines the "everyfan" experience of the author with specific details of the song itself. This approach succeeds and has created a user's guide to QUEEN as well as a backstage pass to a collective generational memory. Read this book, and Dan Nester will indeed rock you!

God Save My Queen is a sexy, sweaty, hardrocking party with Freddie, Brian, Roger and John. But maybe I'm biased. As I did--as so many of us did--Nester grew up listening to the greatest band of all time and in this unique book shares not only his memories and experiences but his genuine love for Queen. The "riffs" (as the jacket copy describes them) are short and catchy as riffs should be. They look a little like poems, but read like interior monologue sometimes, dialogue sometimes, free-association sometimes, nostalgic narrative sometimes. And there's enough rock-n-roll trivia in here to stump the Music Nerd. One of the coolest things about God Save My Queen, it that it is so refreshing to see a straight man (the dedication is to the love of Nester's life, a woman, so I'm extrapolating here) write with such candor, warmth and even doe-eyed crush-puppy love about the bucktoothed homosexual hero of his youth. Anybody who listened (or still listens!) to Queen will love this book. Actually, anybody who survived adolescence as a chunky, nerdy misfit is in for a genuine treat. I hope this weird little book brings Nester lots of success. Rock on!

...because it's a strange book, and we don't have enough strange things these days. I like the footnotes, and the poems are strange, but I like them. I like Queen fine, and Nester brings back memories of listening to music passionately. There's a lot of "too much information" here, a lot of sex, but that may be a plus for some people!

I was disappointed. I bought this book because it was interesting for me to read what a New-York poet can tell me about Queen poetry, Queen meaning for the world. But instead it I found a live journal of 12-years old teenager who even cannot tell what he want to say. Today I eat my soup and thought about Brian May. Looking to my picture disk -how are you, Roger? And this kind of thoughts from the beginning to the end. If it's good tribute from American writer -my condolences to modern American literature. Queen didn't deserved so poor tribute. Shame.

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.

Someone gave me this book--why, I'll never know. I liked Queen a lot once. Do the remaining members know a supremely bad poet has written a tedious book about them? Someone should let them know.

The writer seems to be one of those guys who obsessively remembers stuff about marginal subjects and likes to spout that info. But then he hit on the perfect career path--a poet! So now he can footnote bad poetry with obscure references and call it a book.