The Anthem is kind of like the Equus. It’s been around a very long time, evolved along several lines, and exists today as mostly noble varieties, with a few asses in the fold.
No boring history lesson this day, but the word comes from the Greek antiphon – loosely ‘opposite voice’ – to refer to a call-and-response type of chant. It has developed from its early days of religious worship in temples, then the early church for psalms, motets and various other sacred and liturgical texts, and then bifurcated as a peculiarly English genre around the time of the Reformation and beyond.
Great English composers from the time of William Byrd to latter-day masters like Ralph Vaughan Williams and hundreds in between have created whole brands around the genre. They’re largely sacred settings, though the purpose has been adapted to profane paeans as well.
In popular music, the term is very squishy. There’s no defined form of the Anthem to speak of here, rather it’s more of a ‘badge’ that gets applied by the arts media when a song becomes the rally point, the expression of solidarity around a common purpose. Helen Reddy‘s I Am Woman was never written as a feminist clarion call, but it has endured to become just that. Smells Like Teen Spirit is never, not ever, cited anywhere without the word ‘anthem’ or ‘anthemic’ preceding it. Quite organically, it spoke for more than just a musical movement in the Emerald City; it was zeitgeist, man.
Enough of the Noble Steed. Let’s get to the Ass.
When most of us hear the word, we think of the national anthem. We think of the jingoistic, chauvinistic musically vapid dirge that tells tall and sanitized tales of a nation’s history, heroics and folklore, and otherwise delays sports events by approximately one satisfying bathroom break.
Nowadays, every country’s got one, even if it’s not ‘official’. Some nation-states have many, accounting for their regional diversity. Among their respective subjects, they’re as sacred as their liturgical ancestors, and often make cement-headed men weep. Most are silly and laughable, unless of course you’re from that country; then it’s a missa solemnis.
National anthems are pretty recent in the formation of humanity’s org chart. The use of a patriotic song as a country’s official psalm traces its beginnings to Napoleonic France. Nothing gets folk belting out their fealty like a good war or six, and late-18th-century Gauls were craftsmen there. As city-states grew into nation-states in the multiculturally disastrous 19th century, the anthem became sword and shield for the vox populi. Now we all got ’em.
And we all sing ’em too. By and large, this happens in elementary school classrooms and professional sporting events (though, I have a feeling that there are going to be some changes there… just a hunch). Some community groups also include it in their formal agenda, and you’ll also hear it on sundry other august occasions. Sometimes you’ll even hear it spontaneously, for better or for worse.
Often, an anthem is sung en masse. But if an occasion is formal enough and big enough, someone – often a celeb or VIP – will be offered the honour. And this doesn’t always go swimmingly, even when it appears to do so.
Singing a national anthem, true to its roots in a liturgical setting, is supposed to be a service. The singer serves the collective, the message, and the spirit of shared common value. When called upon to deliver it, the singer has been given an aliya, and accepts as though they are beneath the cause and unworthy of it.
If you were asked to lead a prayer for a congregation, or say grace for a meal, or perform a reading for a ceremony, you would consider that you were charged with an office to speak for all assembled. Would you view it as an opportunity to crack a few jokes? To change the text of the reading to something more florid, or representative of your wit and charm? Would your chosen grace relate your own personal experience of great meals you had in fine restos? Just how much of an asshole would you take license to be, were you charged with with that kind of honour?
Or rather, would you treat it as a shared experience in the company of your fellows? Would you bring dignity and an appropriate measure of gravitas to the call? Would you certainly bring your best effort, but still avoid capitalizing your own self? Would you show a wise humility that assured all assembled that the honour could – and maybe ought to – have been given to any other one of them? Would you carry the central message of the exercise that, at the end of it all, none of us is as great as all of us, and that it’s really all of us that you’re serving?
On 7 February 2016 in Santa Clara, CA, Stefani Germanotta stood in front of a congregation of 71,088 football fans and a global television audience of over 170 million to perform The Star Spangled Banner.
It was, from one blogger’s very humble perspective, quite disgraceful: showy, self-directed, dramatic, greedy, baroque, conceited and completely insensitive toward any common sense of shared value. As spectacles go, it was three-minutes-of-music’s equivalent of a Greek tragedy in three acts (for brevity, we’ll just call it a Lady Gaga ad). As an aliya, it was horrific.
For the United States of America, in other words, it was absolutely perfect.
