From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
Star-Spangled Racket
Oh, say can you hear, a singer ruining that noble song?
CHICAGO--My wife isn't often mute when she doesn't want to be. But last weekend, at a banquet here, she was dead silent for what seemed like an eternity when all she wanted to do--and passionately--was to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner."
The occasion was the annual dinner of the Assembly of Turkish-American Associations, and Turks being a congenitally ceremonious lot, dinner was preceded by the playing of national anthems from both Turkey and America.
No sooner had the recording of the former--the "Istiklal Marsi," or Liberty March--begun than every man jack of Turkish extraction began to sing along with some considerable gusto. (We were all standing at attention, of course.)
Next came the turn of "The Star-Spangled Banner." As her Turkish neighbors beamed at her, my wife prepared--as did, one reckons, most others at the banquet--to sing America's anthem. Yet it proved impossible, for the recording that was played that night was one of those pop-baroque, overornamented renditions by a soul diva that make it impossible for anyone to sing along.
Readers will be familiar with the genre, for there isn't a public rendition of the anthem in America today that doesn't come wallowing in a melismatic sludge. This, the modern American school of anthemic mal canto, is rife wherever we gather in numbers--to watch sports, to remember fallen heroes or to go through any sort of vaguely civic motions in which upliftment is called for. Why, it even plagued a dinner of Turkish-American worthies at a Hyatt in Chicago!
There's a need to put a stop to this form of anthem abuse and to return to a simpler, less self-indulgent manner of singing. Currently most public performances are more about the singer than about the anthem; and Americans don't like that--they loathe it.
I canvassed scores of people in the days after the dinner and not one person in a wide spectrum of ages--I didn't just ask old fogies or my father-in-law and his golfing chums--expressed a preference for the star-spangled caramel that is poured over our eardrums by the likes of Mariah Carey.
What makes the situation doubly irritating is that this interpretation of the anthem is not even true to the gospel and soul music traditions to which it pays its vulgar obeisance.
Aretha Franklin's singing, for example, has never been full of these phony melismas. For her, and for those of her ilk, a simplicity of phrasing has always been regarded as the key to elegance. Her style is courtly, not meretricious, and that is the style in which the anthem (not to mention any song that aspires to the gospel-esque) ought to be delivered.
Whitney Houston knew that when, singing at the Super Bowl in 1991, in the midst of the Gulf War, she gave the nation a clean, muscular version of the anthem. Ms. Carey, who mangled "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Super Bowl this year, opted, by contrast, for the ersatz embellishments of a modern American solipsist--tempting one to ask whether there has ever been a worse public performance of the anthem than hers.
Conventional wisdom has it that the nadir was reached by Jose Feliciano, at a World Series Game in 1968. (One can hear his controversial version at www.josefeliciano.com.) I disagree: His was the first free-form interpretation, an audacious departure from the norm. Full marks for artistic license. Today's singers are tedious copycats, singing what they believe to be the "classy" norm. Zero marks for artistic conformism.
At bottom, of course, is the question of what anthems are for. Some would say that they are objects of worship, or exaltation, not merely of participation; so not being able to sing along oughtn't to matter. But the form of singing to which I, and countless others, object does anything but raise the anthem to a pedestal. All it does is to make it inaccessible as well as utterly inelegant.
Anthems, to be sure, hark back to a more artless nationalism than we could ever have today, and the older ones, such as "God Save the Queen" or the "Marseillaise," were part of the romantic movement in classical music, the first pop music in a way. It was believed, then, that the national soul could be set to a melody.
One may scoff at anthems ideologically, as many Americans do. And in some countries--Romania, for example, which has had six different ones since World War II--there is a certain built-in ambivalence about them. (After all, how often can a totem change before it ceases to inspire awe?)
But that would be a political choice, one of many that citizens are entitled to make. One cannot, however, be expected to tolerate the musical degradation of an anthem without protest. I'm not suggesting that there be catcalls at the next baseball game--that would be much too coarse. Just don't clap afterward. Let there be a great hush of disapproval and quiet protest. It's time to reclaim the anthem from the divas.
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy features editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page. His "Citizen of the World" column appears Tuesdays.
