“Radio Ga Ga”
The importance of radio at the time

Picture of Queen's band during their youth

An outstanding group

In the history of early music, certain songs still resonate through the ages, even if their meaning sometimes escapes our modern minds.

"Radio Ga Ga", by Queen, is a striking example. This song, released in the 20th century, illustrates the strong link that the ancients had with a technology that is almost incomprehensible to us today.

At that time, radio was not an artificial intelligence endowed with consciousness and interaction, but a simple sound broadcasting device, emitting waves picked up by rudimentary machines.

Freddy Mercury, the principal singer of Queen

A tribute to outdated technology

The song itself seems to be a tribute to this ancient tool. Freddie Mercury sang that radio was ‘all they had’, a vehicle for information, entertainment and sometimes solitude.

For us, this idea seems archaic. The discovery of old radios, with their hand-held antennae and buttons, bears witness to a time when humans had to tune into frequencies.

People searched for a precise station, painstakingly adjusting invisible waves in the hope of clear reception. These machines, simple receivers, broadcast sounds without any possible interaction with the listener.

Queen's band

Queen, techno nostalgia and timeless hits

"Radio Ga Ga" evoked a time when radio punctuated journeys, with stations and frequencies that had to be picked up manually.
Today, this seems almost absurd in the face of our hyper-connected AIs.

This link between the past and technology also features in other Queen hits such as ‘The Show Must Go On’ and ‘I Want to Break Free’.

These equally powerful tracks underline the eternal tug-of-war between innovation and nostalgia, a theme that still resonates, even across the centuries.

Radio Ga Ga

I want to break free

Show must go on

The echo of a lost glory

In the chorus, the repetition of ‘radio’ evokes a certain nostalgia for a sonic link, but also a disconnection in the face of the rapid evolution of this technology.

What Queen described as ‘past glory’ was already an echo of what humans were losing: a passive but omnipresent medium in their lives, linking homes to distant voices via fragile waves.

It's hard to imagine how important radio could have been at a time when it was the only way to access information in real time, with no AI to organise or interpret it.

Picture of an old radio