(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Sat 21 March 2026 6:00, UK
In a band as big as Queen, you wouldn’t expect Brian May to be one of the single most diplomatic people in the world.
Anyone else with that kind of recognition could easily give in to their inflated ego, but May has always been more than happy to have written tunes like ‘We Will Rock You’ and move on with his life, making the best music that he can. All of the anthems that he wrote for Queen were the happy by-product of his hard work, but he felt that there were a few songs that he was involved with that he knew didn’t need to see the light of day, like they eventually did.
But every band is going to have more than a few pieces of their catalogue that they prefer over others. It’s no secret that May wasn’t a big fan of the moments where the band gave in to the dance music that was happening at the time, but you could tell that he was happy to go on with it if it meant serving the song the best. If you look at his track record, though, he was more interested in heavier music.
Some of the best riffs in the band’s catalogue have come from him, and even when he isn’t making the greatest rock and roll tracks in their arsenal, he could bring that same flair to any of their ballads. Even though many people like to put the members in their own little boxes, it’s insane to think that the same person behind a riff like ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ can somehow manage to make a tune as folksy as ‘39’ or eventually bring the operatic feel to songs like ‘The Show Must Go On’ or ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’.
But around the 1980s, the music world started changing ever so slightly when hip-hop started to become a bigger deal on the charts. There was no chance that you were ever going to hear Freddie Mercury rapping by any stretch, but their music was an unintended archetype for the genre of sampling. All any sampler needs is the right few seconds where the beat is great, and ‘We Will Rock You’ is still one of the greatest beats anyone has ever come up with.
When May started hearing about Vanilla Ice starting to gain traction, he didn’t necessarily like the idea of him using ‘Under Pressure’ as the basis for ‘Ice Ice Baby’. The guy clearly had a lot of charisma by the standards of the late 1980s, but the fact that he didn’t really do anything with the sample was enough for May to be more than a little bit perturbed when he first heard the song top the charts with his name on the credits.
As far as he was concerned, this was the kind of goofy track that didn’t deserve to be heard once, let alone millions of times, saying, “I just thought, Interesting, but nobody will ever buy it because it’s crap. Turns out I was wrong. Next thing, my son’s saying it’s big here, and what are you going to do about it, Dad? Actually, Hollywood are sorting it out because they don’t want people pillaging what they’ve just paid so much money for. We don’t want to get involved in litigation with other artists ourselves, that doesn’t seem very cool really.”
Then again, May has seemed to come around to the idea that the song served its purpose to a certain degree. No one would call it one of the greatest hip-hop songs of all time by means, but considering its legacy in becoming one of the most obvious samples in the world, it opened the door for other 1990s hip-hop acts to throw their own hats into the ring, whether it was Will Smith becoming one of the biggest stars in the world off of sampling or The Fugees relying on old pop hits for their hooks.
Not all of them are necessarily the greatest uses of old tunes, but it did at least give hip-hop a new avenue to work in that they hadn’t before. Vanilla Ice didn’t really need to be the first one to give this practice to the world, but the fact that it succeeded had a lot more to do with that massive bass line from ‘Under Pressure’ than anything he did.
