It is not possible to harm the revolting cacophony that is To Anacreon in Heav’n or the silly patriotic lyrics that have been inserted into it.
I am not a big supporter of America the Beautiful, but if we have to have a drinking song for an anthem, let it be 100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, Bottle of Wine, or something we can get behind, not a misbegotten tune from some wealthy English playboys that was picked by a bunch of music teachers so they could show off their students’ high notes.
“Revolting cacophony”? Nope, I’m with MaxTorque on this one. We’ve just become so unfamiliar with hearing songs that actually demand some post-kindergarten vocal technique, much less attempting to sing them ourselves, that they start to sound weird to us—and the soloists who put in all kinds of weird ornamentation don’t help, either. “The Star-Spangled Banner” should be sung as our anthem, and should be sung as written (with the Francis Scott Key lyrics, for those who seem to need that point spelled out for them :rolleyes: ), and should be sung by everybody (with allowances made for dropping out on the high notes). How can a song of national unity thrill you if you’re standing there in a geschlumpfet trance with your mouth closed?
Mind you, I’m not saying that TSSB is either great music or great poetry: most anthems aren’t, and the proposed substitutes for it are certainly no better. My one real reservation about it is that the first stanza is actually imparsable:
“Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,” —yeah yeah yeah;
“what” —okay, this is a relative pronoun, introducing a relative clause that functions as the direct object of the transitive verb “see”;
“so proudly we hailed” —still okay, “what” is the direct object of the verb in the relative clause too;
“through the twilight’s last gleaming” —yeah yeah yeah, prepositional phrase adverbially modifying “hailed”;
“whose broad stripes and bright stars” —starting to get a little tricky: another relative clause, whose antecedent in this case is the original “what”;
“through the perilous fight, o’er the ramparts” —yeah yeah yeah, more adverbial prepositional phrases;
“we watched,” —all righty, so “stripes and stars” is the direct object of the verb “watched” within this new relative clause, with a little subject-predicate inversion just to be poetic;
“were so gallantly streaming” —WTF??? All of a sudden the direct object “stripes and stars” is now, and simultaneously, the nominative subject of “were”!! That’s not English! You can say “whose stripes and stars were streaming” or “whose stripes and stars we watched”, but you can’t say them both with just one instance of the object or subject! We don’t say “I watched Cecil was whupping the ass of some grammatically ignorant loser”, do we? Well then, this usage isn’t correct either.
“And the rockets’ red glare…” F. S. Key realizes that he has irretrievably screwed up his sentence, and he can’t rewrite it without sacrificing the rhymes he slaved so hard over, so he gives up and starts a new one. Okay from here on through, grammatically speaking.
Well. That’s my gripe. I sure hope at least one other Doper has slogged all the way through this message and actually gives a tinker’s damn about the issue, because this has always really bothered me. Not enough to make me support switching to “America the Beautiful”, though.
Hey. When they play that crap, I stand and sing it. It’s the current anthem and I’ll do my painful, patriotic duty. I even pitch myself down an octave so I can hit the high notes when we get there.
But it is horrible to hear when done by the best and I would just as soon they found something better.
I’m with you on the “no interpretive anthems”. However, I msut also agree with the posters who diss the song altogether (from a strictly musical standpoint). In the Onion’s Our Dumb Century book there is a headline “Unsingable song of defeat new national anthem”, btw. I mean, look at the ranges in it. Quite a chore for any voice. The Philadelphia Flyers often had Kate Smith sing God Bless America before home games (and still have people sing that instead on some occaisions). This or ATB are better options IMHO. Although as a hockey fan I’ve always thought that Canada has a much better anthem then we do.