Some band names lay their playing cards face-up, consider AC/DC, Kiss, Slayer… whereas others preserve a bit of thriller. Queens Of The Stone Age has all the time sat in that second camp. In a brand new chat with Alternative Nation, Jesse Hughes, frontman of Eagles Of Loss of life Steel and lifelong pal of Josh Homme, provided his studying of the place the moniker comes from and what one of many band’s largest songs may truly be saying.
Here is how Hughes frames the identify’s roots: “The factor about Queens Of The Stone Age is that I really feel like I in all probability understood what was happening a bit of bit higher than everybody else, as a result of Queens Of The Stone Age shouldn’t be a made-up identify.”
“It is an previous homosexual neighborhood time period, okay? And it means an uncool gay, a ‘queen of the stone age.’ Like, ‘Do not invite him. He is not even into Bowie. He likes Liberace. He is an actual queen of the stone age.'”
Taken at face worth, that is a cultural reference hiding in plain sight; a tongue-in-cheek, era-coded phrase became a banner for a band that is all the time combined swagger with side-eye. Whether or not you hear it as affectionate ribbing, reclaimed slang, or a provocation designed to short-circuit macho expectations, it provides a layer to a reputation that when appeared purely enigmatic.
Hughes did not cease on the identify. He additionally waded into track that means, particularly Queens Of The Stone Age‘s breakout hit “No One Is aware of”:
“I do know what the track’s about. I do know what quite a lot of these songs are about – what they’re truly about,” Hughes admitted. “And so they’re heavy, very hard-hitting, deep critiques of individuals in his private life which can be brutal generally – within the method during which they’re taking down their material.”
“However ‘No One Is aware of’ is an attractive technique to say, ‘Please preserve a secret.’ Should you take heed to it now once more and suppose in your head, ‘Preserve a secret,’ you will hear that it is an instruction handbook.”
It is a placing gloss on a observe followers usually learn as surreal or existential. Reframing it as a quiet directive – “preserve a secret” – shifts the track’s rigidity inward. Immediately, the push-and-pull in these grooves feels just like the rhythm of discretion, not simply desert-rock hypnosis. Whether or not or not you purchase each inference, Hughes‘s take traces up with how Homme writes at his sharpest: elliptical lyrics that double as character research and veiled missives.
The 2 artists’ shared historical past offers the feedback extra weight than idle hypothesis. Hughes and Homme launched Eagles Of Loss of life Steel in 1998, with Homme hopping behind the package (amongst different devices) and bringing that loose-limbed, fuzzed-up really feel into a unique lane. The challenge’s most up-to-date studio file, Zipper Down (2015), even spun off a sleeper hit by way of a canopy of Duran Duran‘s “Save a Prayer”.
So, the place does that depart us, who’ve listened to Queens Of The Stone Age for numerous years? Properly, when you’re a part of the broader rock/metallic crowd that loves them for sandblasted riffs and sideways hooks, Hughes‘s remarks provide a helpful immediate: hear again with theme and tone in thoughts, not simply texture. And even when you finally resolve that “No One Is aware of” resists any single studying (and it in all probability does), treating it as an “instruction handbook” makes for a compelling re-spin.
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