Quantifying the diva-ness of national anthem performances
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
Personally, I have always felt very strange in the entire concept of having to sing this at various events or in school as well as the pledging of allegiance. It just feels very cultish or something you'd expect a dictatorship to make its citizens do. Like when we are shown videos of the North Koreans lined up praising the dear leader, the videos of US school kids doing their version of it just rubs me the wrong way
If you’re living in America enjoying the (ever shrinking) bounty of liberties we have, it’s good and healthy for yourself and for the country to reflect on that every now and then, and kids should absolutely have a love of their country (and thus their fellow countrymen) reinforced daily. I think falling away from a national identity hurts everyone.
to me, it's just weird that anyone would pledge their blind loyalty to something that doesn't give a damn about them
The pledge of allegiance, on the other hand, feels like a forced statement of blind loyalty. Gives me the same ick I get whenever I've been at some sort of rally or protest when they try to hype up a crowd. I've never been to church but I'd imagine it's the same thing.
FWIW, I seldom if ever say the Pledge of Allegiance — I took the oath to support and defend the Constitution many years ago when I joined the Navy, and then again as a lawyer; I figure that ought to be plenty ....
My "favorite" part is that they are having kids recite a pledge knowing full well that most of them have no understanding to what it actually means. Taking a pledge should be one of those "I, state your name, of sound mind and body, pledge allegiance..." It's just one of those things that is so illogical to me that I don't get how it's not for everyone else
Also, as "not mandatory", have you ever chosen to remain seated and experienced the reaction from those around you? You'll definitely get the feeling "not mandatory" is a very much incorrect description.
> haven't sung a hymn, pledge or anthem since I was 11 or so. I just stand there and watch, be it church, baseball, hockey, whatever. 32 years and nothing bad has happened yet. (Hooray freedom?). I don't believe there is any pressure whatsoever.
YMMV, but I do just stand up and not sing. It's not the end of the world. And some people always keep their hand down, instead of over heart. Again, I'm really not experiencing difficulties here, but I respect that there might be other factors. Like, do you live in the deep south?
Yes, it’s not mandatory and yes you _could_ sit down and not sing, but the consequences are that your fellow spectators will be agitated. They may not show it in any way, or… …they might!
The interpretation of my intended message has transformed a bit beyond the original scope to include never standing, not even feeling social pressure of any kind, and a comparison to Colin Capernick who attends sporting events in an entirely different capacity than I do. Those points just sound a lot like trying to win an argument on technicality vs have a discussion about experiences.
All I'm saying is you can feel all the pressure in the world to sing a hymn or say a pledge at events, compromise half way by standing, and not sing any national hymn or pledge and suffer no compromises. It is absolutely not required.
My father in law stopped watching sports during the period where it became popular to kneel or not stand during the national anthem to protest or bring to light various social causes. In his view, those things don’t belong in sports. That was his choice, it’s not mine, but he didn’t make a big stink about it, he just chose to stop consuming that form of entertainment.
At some point you either conform, choose not to conform and deal with the consequences, or simply avoid these events. The rest of the populace doesn’t have to change their behavior just because you don’t like it.
Collectively we have become a society of intolerant crybabies. We don’t have to agree with everyone, but we do have to tolerate the common social norms unless we want to be that guy that gets unwanted attention.
I'm really not sure what this has to do with the opinions being expressed by myself, parent, and GP here. I can avoid a behaviour and simultaneously have an opinion on the behaviour, which I am expressing here in response to others' opinions on said behaviour.
I get the impression that you're inferring things about me that aren't actually real. Such as a lack of respect for the fallen.
> I don't believe there is any pressure whatsoever.
You've clearly not been to some of the events that I have. Also, there's the whole matter of various public school systems. Regardless, if there hasn't been any pressure for you, then this is sort of a non-sequitur, as my comment is talking about situations where there is pressure to begin with. Non-pressure situations are out of scope.
Ok, such as?
> Non-pressure situations are out of scope.
I am attempting to say this with respect, believe me: I am saying the pressure is not real. At least in my experience, it's not worth your time. I respect that you may have a different situation than I do, and you may experience pressure of this type differently than I do, but "pressure" strikes me as subjective because in fact there are no real consequences that I'm aware of (as in legal, regulatory, etc). And, without further details, we can freely end here dismissing eachothers' perspectives as irrelevant.
> pressure is not real.
> real consequences that I'm aware of (as in legal, regulatory, etc)
So if I understand correctly, the argument is that social pressure isn't real pressure and can be dismissed as inconsequential? If that's the case, then yeah, I think this is played out and we can call it here.
(Not because I strongly agree or disagree with such a notion, I just kind of think it would be getting off into the weeds a bit much to continue at that point.)
are you willing to take the Pepsi challenge? next event you go to that does the anthem ritual, i challenge you to not participate by sitting down. see what kind of not real pressure you feel then.
Then why do you stand? You can get away without singing, but there is an immense amount of pressure on you to "show respect."
With response "well you don't have to say or sing - I don't"
All the way to arguing over whether I really feel social pressure and how Colin Capernick has to stand so obviously I'm wrong.
We're really deep in the weeds looking for a technicality to nitpic my original statement, don't you think?
I took the original post to be criticizing forced participation in the ritual.
Sons had their legs blown off so you could be free to whine on an online forum about having to honor them for 60-seconds at sporting events you have the freedom to attend. Truly astounding.
We can be thankful to live in this country without needing to force others to do so as well. In fact, to borrow from your earlier point, we actually have the freedom to hold a different opinion about nationalism/patriotism, unlike many oppressive countries.
I agree but it’s the basic defect at the heart of America. It’s a country founded by anti-social individualists, replenished by waves and waves of the sort of anti-social people who would leave their kin and move to the other side of the world. Christianity was the only thing keeping the country from declining into pure atomized individualism, and the hold of that is on the verge of collapsing.
I guess the pilgrims would be considered anti-social as they didn’t ’go along to get along’ but AFAIK powerful trade guilds dominated a large part of the economic private life and the people persecuted/excluded from them may not have had much choice in the matter.
Also, in most every other country, the national anthem is only ever sung when the country is playing an outside country not for internal competition.
A lot of that stuff is early adopter weirdness. You see, other nation states have things like a historical culture or common language to unite them, but the US had to invent a national identity out of whole cloth when no other nation was doing nationalism yet. We need rituals to affirm that we are the members of the in-group.
A year later Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy, was brutally murdered in Mississippi after allegedly flirting with a white woman. His killers were acquitted by an all-white jury. But ya know, at least we shoehorned religion into our pledge.
Following a "symbol" (a religion, a flag, whatever) that can't be properly quantified scares the shit out of me.
"that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Look I find it way overplayed to the point of losing any meaning, and a lot of people (civilians) assign some deeper meaning to the ceremony than is likely warranted, and probably partisan.
But like it or not, America's middle finger to England asserts that some higher power endows us with rights that may not be infringed. It's the basic premise of the whole damn thing. I'm not here to argue whether this is good or bad, but insinuating that it was "shoehorned" doesn't seem fair to history.
The pledge itself wasn't even around until the Civil War, and was worded differently than what is used today. There's a lot of things that people accept as "always been that way" because it was that way when they were kids. It's not dissimilar to how most of the Civil War memorials weren't actually installed until the 1950s.
“Separation of church and state” isn’t in the Constitution. It was something Jefferson said, but he was not representative of the founding fathers on that point. John Adams, by contrast, said: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Public schooling was invented in Massachusetts for the purpose of educating kids about religion. Massachusetts had an official state church (the Congregationalist church) until 1824! The “Establishment Clause” says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” That’s not old-timey speak meaning separation of church and state. It literally just says the federal government can’t interfere with the official state churches, which were called “established churches” (and that the federal government couldn’t establish a church itself).
For the first 170 years of the nation’s existence, nobody thought the Establishment Clause meant that state governments could not teach kids religion in state schools. That was invented pretty much out of thin air in the mid-20th century.
By contrast, the US Constitution doesn’t mention secularism or anything like it. It has a prohibition on the federal government interfering with established state churches, and a protection of freedom of religion. In that respect, the First Amendment is more comparable to the German Basic Law, which guarantees freedom of religion but lacks any requirement of secularism. And the Basic Law has been understood to allow quite a bit of public religion. Religion classes are required in school (though you can opt out and take a class in secular morality instead). Government buildings in Bavaria are required to display crosses. There is a church tax. I think the German approach better fits America both as a legal matter and in terms of what the people want. (America is by far the most religious developed country—the percentage of Americans who pray daily is comparable to Iran!)
What happened with the Establishment Clause in the US is more like what Ershad did in Bangladesh: he changed the constitution from its original meaning, without going through the proper means for amending the constitution. At least in Ershad’s case, the public probably supported theu result. Even as of 2013, most Americans still opposed the prohibition on school prayer.
Tangential: Seems analogous to changing code without changing the documentation — if the change makes things run better, well ....
(And saying, "you're never, ever allowed to change the code unless you change the documentation first" seems to have priorities backwards.)
Jamef Madifon. Checkmate, theist.
(Pulled from Engel v. Vitale, one of the "thin air" cases you allude to.)
Right
> It literally just says the federal government can’t interfere with the official state churches, which were called “established churches” (and that the federal government couldn’t establish a church itself).
You are down selecting only half of what the simple statement says. You are making a distinction of “interference” not in the text.
No religious establishment based “interference”, yes that is consistent with the phrase, but less general than the actual phrase which includes no such restriction.
It also is consistent with no establishment based “preference”.
“No law…” is the actual clear, simpler, and more general wording.
Said Creator they deliberately left out entirely. It popped into the Pledge during the era of fighting the "godless Commies".
and fighting against civil rights. it is also the same era that people want to make great again. oops, i said the quiet part out loud again
We live in a society. The government takes 40-50% of your income every year so you can support the other people who are part of the same society. It allows you to survive and protects you from those that would harm you both internal and external. Saying a short affirmation of loyalty to that entity once in a while seems pretty mild in comparison.
Faux performative patriotism. You took the oath to support and defend the Constitution when you were admitted to the bar. That ought to be enough.
Performative chants serve as a form of mass hypnosis - to solidify the legitimacy of a batshit insane society in the weak minds who just want to go along to get along.
Our society is fucked. And those of us fortunate enough to be in the creative class can wax philosophical about it in our luxury boxes while everyone else gets fucked.
Shared rituals reinforce shared values.
Are they just not teaching civics anymore? Even the nuns at St. Barnabas were clear on this point with us. If this is reverse psychology trying to get me to put my hand on my heart and pledge the flag, well played.
I suspect in a couple of decades it will become the accepted view. It’s similar to how by 1990 (when I was in school) we had erased Christianity from the national origin story by projecting Thomas Jefferson’s deism onto all the founders.
Wait, America now has European levels of taxation?
I think the multitude of anthems are pushed by military funding to intentionally conflate patriotism with support for the military.
One thing I especially don’t like is the reflexive ‘thank you for your service’ that has entered into polite behavior. I believe that was an intentional and highly effective campaign. I personally refuse to do it even to be polite. I take the Smedly D Butlers view that ‘War is a racket’.
if you watch cinema in India, you have to stand up for the national anthem before the movie starts lol. similar situation in Thailand iirc.
I would go further and ask for changing the national anthem to a song that anyone can sing. God Save the King is a good example of what a country should go for.
In this case though, I was presented with 2 buttons with no clear way to progress at first (blank page, turns out you have to click on 'continue muted' before even a scrollbar appears, albeit almost unnoticeably thin), and the rest of the content was only available piecemeal.
If you unconventional-scroll through this piecemeal content to the very end (including an entire full screen autoplaying video, even if your screen is UHD), you actually find a little red button marked "skip to more data". And if you click on that you actually find a wealth of data. And no other path to reach it that I can see.
• Starting from the note you would like to start SSB with, start singing "What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor" (DS). That repeats the opening note though to the "drun" and then drops a fifth for the "ken". A fifth is also the lowest SSB goes below its starting note, so if you are OK with the first drop in DS you should be fine with the low parts of SSB.
Alternatively you can use the "Flintstones" (FS) theme. It drops a fifth from the "flint" to the "stones".
To check the high end, "Over The Rainbow" (ORB) works. The jump in the first word, "somewhere", from the "some" up an octave to the "where" is the same as the interval from the start of SSB to the highest note of SSB.
That actually fits in nicely with DS. After that drops down a fifth in the middle of singing "drunken" the next word, "sailor" goes back up in a couple thirds to get back to the starting not. So just keep going from there but switching to ORB.
• Instead of checking from the note you want to start with, you can check from the lowest note you can comfortably handle.
Starting from that low note, start singing "Scarborough Fair" (FAIR). This jump in "are you going" from "you" to "going" is a fifth. Then switch to ORB. So sing "are you going somewhere over the rainbow" starting with FAIR melody and switching to the ORB melody at "somewhere".
If you can reach the high note on "where" you've SSBs range covered.
Instead of FAIR you can use the opening two notes of the "Star Wars" them or of "Also Sprach Zarathustra".
Where i am from the national anthem is usually sang by a choir, and people in the crowd can join in the singing with them.
What is even more weird to me is why would anyone choose a popstar to sing the anthem? They are known to be show-offs and highly individualistic. It is kind of like hiring a formula-1 champion to drive a hearse and then being surprised that they drive it fast. What were they expecting?
The metaphorical implications of us formerly enslaved folks often making this song our own...like whew, where to begin?
* Beyonce 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGDH18R7GfA
* H.E.R. 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL8sJEv00PU
* Jazmine Sullivan 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XkiuGRo3rk
* And of course the GOAT, Whitney 1991 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n9bxfxE25Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2KYZ1BritY
Clearly I'm a fan of people putting their spin on this. I take pride in American's being given free reign to interpret it how they wish. I feel like it embodies the spirit of invention, ambition, freedom, and creativity that I consider to be a (mostly) positive quality of our national character.
It's a good thing because a lot of people sing along in the stands if given the opportunity -- which is largely impossible with most of these big ego diva renditions.
Far better than I could do, without a doubt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny2azUt5d3Y
...apparently the session singer nailed it in one take.
Bleeding Gums Murphy was ultimately portrayed by three voice actors across the character's arc.
Can youuuu - I'M ASKING - can you seeee?
Courtesy of Mariah Carey, especially.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/11427z/why_cant_...
>If it's just a note-for-note redo of the original, why bother?
People's individual voices are different. It's not like a synthesizer where every note sounds the exact same.
>Do you think Johnny Cashs's version of "Hurt" would've been better if he tried to sound like Nine Inch Nails?
From a quick look it seems like the main difference is that John doesn't mumble as much. I think it's fine to clearly enunciate the words of a song. I don't think that changes the song.
But: Call me a chauvinist — the National Anthem is different.