Stop Asking Celebrities to Sing Our National Anthem

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Stop Asking Celebrities to Sing Our National Anthem

It was the first game of the 1918 World Series. The Chicago Cubs were playing the Boston Red Sox in Chicago. The country had entered World War I the previous year, so the baseball season leading up to this series had been cut short — men of draft age had been given a deadline to join the war effort.

During the seventh-inning stretch, the military band in the stadium tried something new. The song they played was an old one, and it had been played at baseball games before — typically on special occasions, like opening day. But it had been recently rearranged by a team that included the renowned John Philip Sousa. When the band broke into this new version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” there was no script to follow; everything was improvised. Players took off their hats and faced the flag. Fred Thomas, an active-duty sailor who played for the Red Sox, struck a military salute. As for the audience: “First the song was taken up by a few,” The Times reported, “then others, and when the final notes came, a great volume of melody rolled across the field. It was at the very end that the onlookers exploded into thunderous applause and rent the air with a cheer that marked the highest point of the day’s enthusiasm.”

The moment was powerful enough that the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” again at the second game of the series, and again at the third. When play moved to Boston, the band there played it, too — now at the beginning of the game, and accompanied, in one case, by the presentation of wounded soldiers who had been given tickets. The song has been played at every World Series game since. In 1931, it became the nation’s official anthem. By World War II, the spread of electronic public-address systems meant it could be performed — and eventually sung — at every professional baseball game, not just those where someone hired a band.

Today it is a fixture at most all ********* sporting events, professional and ******** alike. (In many countries, the national anthem is typically played only before international competitions.) Promising young vocalists sing it at local games. Celebrities vie to perform it at high-wattage events like the World Series and the Super Bowl. What was once a novel, improvised wartime gesture has become a ritual — something we expect as a matter of course.

It is a tough gig, whatever the circumstances. The song’s melody is notoriously difficult to belt out. ******** singers are cut plenty of slack — it’s the spirit that counts — but pop stars are held to a high standard. We ask them to apply their talents to stir us into special contact with our own love of country. But we ask them to do so as part of big-budget, for-profit spectacles, in a media culture that valorizes novelty over tradition.

Anthem fails constitute a subgenre of their own.

This is a treacherously thin psycho-cultural line to walk. Most stars clear it just fine, especially when aided by the national mood. There are many who cite

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at the 1991 Super Bowl as the pinnacle of modern pregame renditions — and it is indeed jaw-dropping, full of

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. But part of what vaults it into the stratosphere is the stadium’s palpable hunger, still detectable in videos, for unity: The ******* States had entered the Persian Gulf war just 11 days earlier. Houston was joined on the field by servicemen holding the flags of America’s military allies, and as she hit the final note, four F-16 fighter jets streaked across the sky. (It is no accident that for many years the Department of Defense spent millions of dollars to subsidize spectacles like this.)

It is in times of peace — or unacknowledged or polarizing wars — that the anthem ritual can feel removed from its original purpose. First it becomes something we do because we’ve always done it. Then comes a more modern twist: The tradition becomes entertainment, and we become critics, watching to see which performers will join the pantheon of greats and which will face our collective jeers.

In the internet age, anthem fails constitute a subgenre of their own. Last month, after the Grammy-nominated country singer Ingrid Andress delivered a hopelessly off-pitch rendition at the Home Run Derby, the footage ricocheted around the web. You could watch players struggling not to laugh; you could hear audience members booing the anthem of their own nation. (The following day, Andress issued an apology: She had been ******, she said, and was heading to rehab.) Predictably, the performance prompted a new round of “Worst Anthem of All Time” clickbait. Remember

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? Or Roseanne Barr tunelessly shrieking her way through her performance, then responding to boos by grabbing her ******* and spitting on the field? (President George H.W. Bush: “Disgraceful.” Barr: “I’d like to hear him sing it.”) How about Christina Aguilera

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and straining for the last note?

It’s not always technical missteps that bother people. During the 1968 World Series, the Puerto Rican-born folk singer José Feliciano took to Detroit’s Tiger Stadium, acoustic guitar in hand, and delivered a version of the anthem that was part ****** jazz, part ’60s folk revival. He didn’t change a word, but his interpretive choices had the audience bombarding him with boos; people from across the country called into NBC, condemning them for broadcasting it. Feliciano later said that he was trying to get people to listen to a song they’d become used to tuning out — and indeed, his “Banner” ended up hitting the pop charts. Along with other well-known interpretations — like

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at Woodstock — it inaugurated a new possibility: that a performer might refashion the anthem to catch the winds of social change.

In general, though, this does not seem to be what people want. There are exceptions:

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that tweaked the song into something worthy of soul radio. (In videos, the crowd seems initially disoriented, but by the end they are clapping and hollering along.) For every Gaye, though, there’s at least one Fergie (of the ****** Eyed Peas), mocked for a performance at the 2018 N.B.A. All-Star Game that recalled a lounge singer ordered at gunpoint to be as over the top as possible. (Roseanne Barr weighed in on

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: “I think mine was better lowkey.”) Or a Steven Tyler, who tactlessly changed “home of the brave” to “home of the Indianapolis 500.”

All these performers, from the triumphs to the disasters, face a challenge that is not of their own making. We have taken a spontaneous outpouring of sentiment, one that thrilled 1918 audiences as America engaged in one of its deadliest wars to date, and we have turned it into a ritual repeated every time we gather for any variety of athletic spectacle, from minor-league-baseball games to demolition derbies — outsourcing our patriotic expression to passing celebrities while we stand silently and teach our children not to fidget through this solemn chore. We repeat this over and over, with cameras rolling, and then laugh when the law of averages produces inevitable disasters.

Allow me to make a modest proposal. Let’s institute a temporary moratorium — a year, say, to start — on hiring performers to sing the anthem at big-ticket sports games. Give the celebrities a break. No fighter jets. Just play the music through speakers, and let the audience do what it will. Make us participate. Make us sing, and sing together, or go without singing at all. Coax us back into making and remaking the ritual. It won’t always sound great, I’m sure. But now and then we might rediscover that strangest ********* thing: our ability to surprise one another.

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Source photographs for illustration above: Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos, via Getty Images; Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Getty Images; John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated, via Getty Images.

Peter C. Baker is a freelance writer in Evanston, Ill., and the author of the novel “Planes.” He edits

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a newsletter about how people experience songs.

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#Stop #Celebrities #Sing #National #Anthem

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