A Star-Spangled Banner for the Ages

But not, unfortunately, for good reasons

Having heard Ingrid Andress' performance at the MLB Home Run Derby Monday night, I think we may now be able to retire the coveted trophy for Worst Rendition of the National Anthem at a Major US Sporting Event. Have a listen.

To my ears, it is considerably worse—more grotesquely out of tune—than the only real competition, Fergie's rendition at the 2018 NBA All-Star Game. [I have eliminated Roseanne Barr's spectacularly awful 1990 performance before a San Diego Padres game from consideration because she clearly wanted it to be awful, and that violates the rules of the competition.]

I don't mean to pile too much criticism onto Ms. Andress, who admitted after the performance that she had been drunk. She's got, obviously, a pretty serious alcohol problem—to get drunk before the most important performance, by far, of your life is a pretty terrifyingly self-destructive act. She has subsequently checked herself into rehab, and I genuinely wish her well, although the message she sent out on Instagram announcing her decision was not encouraging, and was meant, I hope, to be taken as sarcasm:

"I'm not gonna bullshit y'all, I was drunk last night. I'm checking myself into a facility today to get the help I need…. I'll let y'all know how rehab is! I hear it's super fun."

And speaking of national anthems, the recent international soccer tournaments in Europe and in the US revived my fondness for national anthems—there's nothing quite like hearing 30,000 or so people belting out La Marseillaise, or Il Canto degli Italiani, or O! Canada!, to get the blood running.

It makes me wonder whether there has ever been a good comparative study of the world's national anthems. They're pretty interesting, I think, insofar as they all—every last one, as far as I can tell—sound like they were written in Vienna or Dresden around 1880. There's a wonderful compilation of all of them here—pick a few at random and have a listen. China, Cameroon, El Salvador, Bahrain, Uruguay, Pakistan, …

It's quite bizarre, when you think about it. All of these countries—… Nicaragua, Senegal, the Comoro Islands, Malaysia, Tunisia, Argentina …—each with their own very distinctive domestic musical traditions, and each one has, as its "national anthem," something that sounds like it came out of Johann Strauss' workshop.

Obviously, much of the explanation for this astonishing homogeneity is that it is a holdover from colonial days.  But many, many artifacts of the increasingly distant Colonial Era have been dispensed with—constitutions have been re-written, new languages have been declared "official," public school curriculums have been revised, etc. Why has nobody changed its national anthem? Might be an interesting subject for a book.