So am I. Have you ever sung the anthem in front of a huge noisy crowd and television cameras?
I am a Republican and an ARCH Conservative.
But I have to say, I think your invective is a bit over the top. She did apoologize.
Given that IIRC **BigT **can’t even leave his parents’ basement due to severe agoraphobia, I’m guessing that’s a “no.”
Fine. Now justify the fancy voice gymnastics. I believe that’s how someone described it in another thread.
A bajillion people watch American Idolt, so apparently what Americans really want out of their performers is vocal gymnastics.
I came to this thread late and just watched the linked clips in the OP. I just wanted to point out that Mo Cheeks really did a nice thing by helping that young girl through the song. Pretty cool. I already liked him, but his stock just went up in my book.
Wikipedia agrees with you, but the book “Crazy '08” (about the 1908 baseball season) says it started during World War One.
If this is convincing, it claims to be a picture of standing for the anthem at the 1924 World Series.
I didn’t always have agoraphobia, genius. When I say I was a singer, I meant it. I don’t mean I just sing in the shower. :rolleyes:
Maybe not that many people, but I have sang in front of people all my life. I’ve even made mistakes from being nervous, albeit at 5 or 6 when I was just starting out, not after being a professional one-named singer good enough to sing at the Super Bowl.
I was taught that one learns a song to the point that nervousness doesn’t factor in. You practice nervous. So when you are out there, you don’t mess up. I’ve only messed up as an adult when I didn’t adequately prepare.
And this isn’t the little local star who has never sang in front of people before. This is Christina Aguilera. She sings in front of people all the time. Surely by now she’s learned what she needs to do to not let the remaining nervousness negatively affect her performance. And it’s not like she’s singing in front of actual judges (which practically killed me as a music major).
Yes, I said she “just didn’t care,” and that was hyperbole. But I do think she didn’t care enough to adequately prepare. My response about her not liking the anthem was a response to someone else in the thread who claimed that the anthem didn’t matter. I shouldn’t have shoehorned it in where it didn’t make sense.
But my basic point remains.
Interesting. I had always heard it was a post Pearl Harbor thing, and someone stading for the anthem in 1924 wouldn’t, of course, tell us when it started to be played at every major league game. I could see it at the World Series but not other games.
It was always one of my favorite things about the FA Cup Final - hearing “Abide With Me” sung by a crowd of around 100,000.
Yeah, that seems to be right. Further research suggests it was done at the 1918 World Series (not the first game ever, but that one that seems to have ‘lit the fire’, so to speak), and then at ‘special’ games, including World Series games, for many years after that. Around WWII, it was every game. I’d link to cites, but they themselves mostly don’t have cites, but most pages seem to agree (including the SDMB).
So because your incidents have been entirely down to poor preparation, there’s no reason why anyone else could ever have an issue for some other reason? Your experience is 100% universal?
Exactly, and she’s been singing this song in front of people since she was prepubescent.
Which would mean that the logical explanation would be that something occurred. It could’ve been in her head, but given the environment, there could’ve been a distraction in her eye line, a flash in the camera in front of her face or a pop in her monitor earplug as well. It may not even be something that she could name, but it was enough to take her out of her game for the beat long enough to throw off the song.
I’ve seen it happen to singers with 25 year histories as touring, performing musicians who’ve played to tens of thousands, who were performing songs they wrote themselves. As just one example, the last time I saw U2, Bono fumbled the lyric to “Vertigo” and just stopped singing. Michael Stipe has a teleprompter in order to keep up with the REM songs that he wrote. Humans aren’t machines. Things happen, for a variety of reasons.
It’s a very nice ideal, but the practical reality is that people screw up, at all levels from amateur to the top of the professional ranks. Should they? No. But it happens. Can and should we criticize people when they screw up? You betcha. But it doesn’t reflect a lack of preparation, professionalism, or dedication. It reflects the fact that performers are people, and people screw up, even when fully qualified and eminently prepared.