I wonder how Cyndi would do the Star-Spangled Banner. That might be worth listening to.
I think she’d do a fine job, myself. Tons of talent and not a showboat.
True - people often forget that. But you and I know someone would still complain if she did not do it 100% “straight”.
If he’s classically trained, then that video is a really bad example. He is shouting towards the end with really strident notes. It was better than that Discovery channel guy, but not great.
That’s actually the thing. Getting a professional singer is a good idea. The bad idea is getting someone who wants to show off so much. There is a point where you are no longer singing the anthem, but your own made up song.
The thing about messing up the lyrics is not that people don’t make mistakes. It’s that she was doing so much stuff to try to impress that she lost the most basic part. This shows an undesirable set of priorities.
I think people are responding so negatively because we already have some dislike of singing the anthem just to show off, and this mistake brought it to a head.
At least, I hope people don’t actually think she hates America. It even made the OP look like a joke thread.
Well, that’s pretty depressing. I’ve been to a few rugby league grand finals (1980s and 1990s), and i used to watch all the others on TV, and i don’t remember them playing the anthem. Could be that they did, and i forgot about it, i guess.
Still think it’s silly.
It’s funny that I didn’t even notice her messing up the lyrics, but I did take note and mentally tsk-tsk the person who sang “America the Beautiful” because she said “for purple mountain majesties…”
All I can say is that since I’m a Steeler fan I must have been getting too worked up by the time of the Anthem to notice Christina’s screw up.
Maybe there’s something about singers from Pittsburgh screwing up the National Anthem. I remember Perry Como screwing them up before an NCLS game between the Pirates and Reds at Three Rivers Stadium in 1990.
I could’ve done a better job.
Not really, in front of all those people I would probably piss myself and forget all the words. And I can’t sing a note anyway. It’s unfortunate she messed up the words, but she wouldn’t be the first nor the last and it reflects nothing on her patriotism. And I personally like that folks try to make something special out of the anthem.
I suspect that for singers (like Aguilera) whose strength is that sort of cascading melisma, it’s almost a kind of laziness that compels them to twirl off on little tangents rather than stay on the note. Laziness, and maybe even self-doubt: if they sing it “straight” and hit a clinker, everybody’s going to hear it, but if you’re doing the equivalent of sweeping your palms up and down the piano keys, who’ll be able to tell? Plus, you know that a section of the audience is classically conditioned to cheer whenever they hear that shit, which is probably a nice ego-boost.
But isn’t the point of a national anthem precisely that its value, its specialness, comes from the words and from the sentiments of unity and patriotism that they engender?
Look, i’m no fan of national anthems. I think that they’re generally silly songs, and that they often tend to encourage or sustain cheap, unreflective nationalism. But plenty of Americans disagree with me, and they generally disagree precisely because they believe in the patriotic feelings that the anthem is meant to symbolize. And that’s why the anthem itself should be performed with a minimum of fuss and self-indulgence, because it’s not just being performed for the crowd; it is, in a sense, being performed on behalf of the crowd.
Of course, in most countries, the idea is that everyone in the crowd should also be singing. I’ve been at Twickenham and Wembley for international rugby union and rugby league matches, and much as i dislike “God Save the Queen,” it’s pretty damn rousing and inspiring to hear it belted out by 70,000 people. That’s made difficult in the United States by the fact that the anthem is one of the least democratic in all the world. It is a song that can’t be sung competently by anyone with a limited vocal range, so instead of being the people’s song, as it’s supposed to be, it’s been turned into just another piece of shitty entertainment.
But alas, she chose to be trendy…and failed on both counts.
I’m confused. That’s what I’ve always thought it was, and Wikipedia confirms it. What did you think?
No.
“Trendy” is when someone tries to be a trendsetter by doing something drastically different…a la Christina Aguilerra.
The only thing Houston could be considered “trendy” is being in the small minority of singing the anthem that was correct AND enjoyable.
Yeah, but then there was that hideous, caterwauling “I Will Always Love You”. I have always generally liked Whitney Houston, but I always wanted to smack her by the end of that song every time I was forced by cruel circumstance to sit all the way through it.
There was a Jim Thompson novel where the main character was a musician, and he was always complaining about how his chanteuse girlfriend would “bitch up” the songs they played. I think Aguilera’s performance was what he was talking about.
While working as a rhythm-section sideman, I was privileged to accompany quite a few professional and semi-pro singers. That overblown melismata has always driven me to distraction, unless used with discretion and for specific effect. I agree with VT that the “Screamers” (my term for them) may have real difficulty in hitting the note pitch-wise and use their ornamentation to disguise that problem. I like to imagine the anthem sung by someone with serious chops (Maureen McGovern, Annie Haslam, K. D. Lang…sound of crickets).
Oh yeah, slight observation - we don’t really need to cheer after the anthem ends - it’s an anthem, not a Metallica concert. Although, we may be cheering because another lousy version has finally ended.
Other than that… I got nada.
I hardly think singing the anthem with lots of extended notes is doing something drastically different. Weren’t they making fun of that style of delivery on The Simpsons decades ago? Not really groundbreaking stuff.
I was taught “for purple mountains’ majesty.” Singular majesty, plural possessive mountains.
That comes up with a lot of hits, but nothing as official as Wikipedia. Learn something new every day, I guess.
I think that if someone like Aguilera (who is obviously a secret Muslim) chops up the national anthem with her singy-song crappy sounding vocal style, the least, I mean the very least she could do is get the lyrics right. I have always despised her wavery-way of shit slinging singing, it just sounds like shit, don’t care if it is technically difficult to do or not. I mean who really cares how hard it is to sing that way if it sounds crappy? Music should sound good, whether is technically difficult to do or not. Too many musicians have forgotten what music really is, and the fact that it should sound good.
The real loser is who hired Aguilera in the first place (obviously Muslims are behind this, it’s a conspiracy to slowly rape America - first our Anthem, and then who knows what will be attacked next)
And to consider how much she must have been paid to crap all over the anthem with her show-off style makes me want to barf.
Why do Muslims hate the Super Bowl?
First time I ever heard of Christina Aguilera, she was 11 or 12 years old and sang the anthem for a Stanley Cup finals game here in Pittsburgh for the Penguins. She was also performing the anthem at that age (around her Mickey Mouse Club stint) for the Pirates and the Steelers.
She knows the anthem, and from the age of 12 could sing circles around 99% of the population on that horrible, plodding tune with its paceless and non-linear lyric.
Disliking her style, which is distinct and has been her trademark from her youth (she was singing “At Last” and “Sunday Kind of Love” in that torchy belting style at the age of nine) is one thing. But she was hired to be Christina Aguilera singing the national anthem, not as a singer of the national anthem who happened to be Christina Aguilera. The mistake in the lyrics (which as a former public anthem singer I’ll put down to absolute nerves) aside, she no more “ruined” the anthem singing it in her known, definitive style than Faith Hill did when she sang it in her known, individual style, or Billy Joel in his style, or Marvin Gaye in his.
And as for it being an occasion where mistakes are unacceptable, perhaps we should tell that to the players, who were making mistakes all over the field during the game. You know, the part that counted. If a receiver who makes millions a year can drop a pass right through his hands and cost his team the game, a singer can bumble some arcane, archaic bullshit lyrics in an anthem that glorifies war, doesn’t even name the nation it “represents” and needed to be replaced 100 years ago.