Where is Geisha Minah from the Queen song ‘Killer Queen’?
In October 1974, Queen were still on the fringes of the glam and prog rock movements, and most of the world had yet to hear of Freddie Mercury. One song was about to change all that. Beginning in earnest by name-dropping Moët et Chandon, Marie Antoinette, Khrushchev and Kennedy in its first six lines, ‘Killer Queen’ became an early theme song of sorts for the operatic English rockers.
It climbed all the way to number two in the UK singles chart, leading the album it appears on Sheer Heart Attack to the same position, and became the band’s first song to chart in the United States. Nowadays only die-hard Queen fans remember anything else the band put out before it.
The track perfects the close harmonies that would become the band’s signature on later records. It also showcases Mercury’s charismatic style of storytelling and demonstrates the potential of his musical collaboration with guitarist Brian May. It exudes the swagger that epitomised glam rock at the time, but May was initially concerned that it made the band sound “very light”. Roger Taylor saw things differently, though, recalling that the song “always felt a bit special.” It was, in his words, “very Freddie.”
May needn’t have worried, and would later admit that the song was the “turning point” in the band’s career, with its theatricality and unabashed musicality giving it mass appeal. Its lyrics offer a fair few mouthfuls, however, not least in the second-verse rhyming couplet “Met a man from China / Went down to Geisha Minah”.
Is Geisha Minah actually in China, then?
As it turns out, rhyming was Mercury’s primary motivation for writing the couplet rather than conveying any real meaning. In fact, the term “Geisha Minah” is the only term in the song’s lyrics that can be completely made up. It’s not a real place, and if it were, it certainly wouldn’t be in China. Mercury was trying his hand at the kind of absurdist phrase-making the likes of Bob Dylan and John Lennon had become known for during the previous decade.
He borrows the word “geisha” from the Japanese term for a female entertainer who is hired by wealthy clientele to perform traditional dances or songs. It likely came about in the lyrics through a vague, orientalist association with China in Mercury’s mind. “Minah”, on the other hand, is a word entirely of his own invention, created to make an assonant pun on the term Asia Minor, which was used by the Romans and their European descendants to refer to the Middle East.
Given the speed of Mercury’s adept lyricism throughout the song, this nonsensical place name appears to make perfect sense as it flies by amid all the “gun powder, gelatine” and “laser beams”. No one would have noticed it at the time it came out. It’s only in hindsight that we have time to stop and wonder what far-flung corner of the universe Freddie was visiting.
