The classic Queen cut “We Will Rock You” is a sport anthem for the threat it implies. Queen’s genius was to pair it with the follow-up “We Are The Champions.” The one-two punch hits like a Muhammad Ali combo. If your team does what Queen says to do in the first song, they’ll get to be the champions for sure. Victoria Arlen and Val Chmerkovskiy dance a Paso Doblé to “We Will Rock You” on Dancing With The Stars Movie Night, competing with the nine remaining couples to avoid elimination in Week 6 of DWTS.
Everybody but everybody knows the song. Even those who’ve never turned on rock radio have heard “We Will Rock You” at sporting events or anywhere people gather together for a cause. It’s an anthem, and it works for almost anything. Sports movies is the category for Victoria and Val. As you watch them dance it’s a fascinating exercise to imagine them dancing to a lesser known Queen recording of “We Will Rock You” recorded for the BBC in 1977, at the height of punk rock. (It appears on the album Queen on the Air.) The band released the track (listen below) in 2016, long after singer Freddie Mercury‘s death, and it shows Queen and Mercury hitting the song like punk rockers — fast and furious — a million miles from “Bohemian Rhapsody.” This “We Will Rock You” is a strictly not ballroom version, even more so than the famous recording. But whoever could dance to this fast punk version would have have to win Dancing With The Stars — or at least win the week! Dancing With the Stars airs Mondays at 8pm on ABC.
