Freddie Mercury^†

'Killer Queen' in 1974 was the first Queen track to crack the US charts. The real detonation came the following year with 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' a six-minute operatic rock hybrid that no radio programmer wanted to play and that topped the UK charts for nine weeks anyway. His voice needed no effects, no studio tricks. The Live Aid set at Wembley in 1985, watched by an estimated 400 million viewers, settled the argument: nobody else in that lineup could hold 72,000 people in the palm of their hand.

The 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody became the highest-grossing musical biography ever made, which is a strange kind of validation for a band that critics underestimated while he was alive. His public statement confirming his AIDS diagnosis, released the day before he died, made him the first major rock star to publicly confirm the disease. That act shifted conversations about HIV globally. The Mercury Phoenix Trust has since funded over 1,500 projects across 57 countries.

He was born Farrokh Bulsara in Stone Town, Zanzibar, to Parsi Indian parents, and fled to England in 1964 when the Zanzibar Revolution forced his family out. He never went back. At 12, he was covering Little Richard at a boarding school in India under the name Freddie. His layered background, Zanzibari, Parsi, British, rarely surfaced in interviews, and he didn't push it. He wore a gold band his partner Jim Hutton gave him in 1986 until the day he died, and was cremated wearing it.

The tribute concert at Wembley Stadium on April 20, 1992 sold all 72,000 tickets within three hours of going on sale, with no lineup announced. An estimated one billion viewers watched as Elton John, David Bowie, George Michael, and Metallica performed. The concert raised £20 million for the Mercury Phoenix Trust. Queen released Made in Heaven in 1995, built from his final unreleased recordings.