Global Beat: How Roger Taylor Became the World’s Accidental Emperor of Rhythm

The Drummer Who Outlasted Empires: Roger Taylor’s Quiet Reign Over a Planet in 4/4 Time
By “International” Ed Malone, somewhere over the Atlantic, still waiting for the seat-belt sign to turn off

Mention the name “Roger Taylor” in a bar in Buenos Aires and you’ll get a Queen medley hummed by a septuagenarian with a hip flask. Whisper it in a Berlin techno cellar and the DJ will drop a half-remembered drum fill before segueing into something with more ketamine. Fly to Lagos and the danfo bus driver has air-drummed “Radio Ga Ga” while negotiating four lanes of suicidal okadas. Somewhere along the line, the boy who bashed biscuit tins in 1960s Cornwall became a planetary metronome, keeping 8-billion anxious souls in imperfect time.

It’s easy to dismiss drummers as the guys who get the worst hotel rooms, but Taylor has transcended percussion the way certain viruses transcend species. While empires contracted, currencies collapsed, and Twitter feuds replaced diplomacy, his hi-hat work became a form of soft power. UNESCO hasn’t noticed yet, but any diplomat worth his expense account will confess that the opening cowbell of “Don’t Stop Me Now” has defused more tense border checkpoints than the Vienna Convention ever managed.

How did a dental student with a blond pageboy become a geopolitical constant? The short answer is Freddie Mercury’s voice; the long one involves the peculiar late-capitalist alchemy that turns teenage rebellion into timeless Muzak. Taylor, to his credit, understood the joke early. While his bandmates were still pretending stadium rock was a spiritual vocation, he was already diversifying: solo albums, side hustles, a cameo in a Bond film that even Bond would like to forget. He grasped that in the modern attention economy, survival equals ubiquity, and ubiquity means licensing your back catalogue to every streaming service, airline safety video, and TikTok influencer with a ring-light.

The numbers are vulgar. “Bohemian Rhapsody” alone has been streamed 2.4 billion times—roughly the combined population of China and India air-guitaring in their bedrooms while the climate gently melts. Each stream drops a fraction of a cent into Taylor’s Cayman account, which compounds into the sort of wealth that buys Caribbean islands and, if rumors from Montreux are accurate, a small flotilla of life-size Dalek statues. The Swiss bankers call it “intellectual property”; the rest of us call it the most efficient colonization since the East India Company, only with better harmonies.

Yet Taylor’s true genius lies in not appearing to give a damn. In an era when pop stars treat trauma like a competitive sport, he still shows up to interviews in sunglasses, deflecting earnest questions about legacy with a shrug that says, “I was just trying to get laid in 1975.” That studied indifference is catnip to a world drowning in sincerity. While other legacy acts launch heartfelt podcasts about mental health, Taylor releases a single called “Gangsters Are Running This World”—a three-minute garage-rock sneer that somehow charted in 23 countries without a single TikTok dance challenge. The message is clear: if the planet is sliding into autocracy, at least we can have a decent backbeat to accompany the looting.

And the planet has taken note. In Kyiv, the metro orchestra recently performed “A Kind of Magic” as air-raid sirens harmonized in the key of existential dread. In Tehran, bootleg Queen cassettes circulate like samizdat, with Taylor’s falsetto on “I’m in Love with My Car” serving as code for “the traffic is unbearable and the morality police are busy.” Even the North Korean state band has been caught rehearsing “We Will Rock You,” presumably after misreading the lyrics as a policy statement.

So what does it mean, this long, strange sovereignty of Roger Taylor? Perhaps only that every civilization needs its drummer—someone to keep time while the rest of us argue over whose fault the fire is. History will remember the presidents, the pandemics, the price of wheat futures, but the subconscious of the species will keep tapping that foot: boom-boom-clap, boom-boom-clap, the eternal heartbeat of a species too distracted to notice the stage is collapsing.

And when the lights finally go out—climate, nukes, or a badly labeled asteroid, take your pick—somewhere in the void, an alien probe will pick up a faint signal: a snare hit, a cymbal crash, a Yorkshire-accented “Oi!” floating through the vacuum. Proof that we were here, that we were ridiculous, and that for four glorious minutes we managed to synchronize our chaos.

Encore, humanity. Encore.