Come On, Aretha, It's Kickoff Time

This is not the piece I actually intended to publish this morning, but sometimes the best-writ columns get overtaken by events.

By "events", I'm referring to the otherwise-interesting NFL game played on Thanksgiving between the now-6-4 Minnesota Vikings and the now-7-5 Detroit Lions, after the Lions won in the last few moments of the game.  But the game almost didn't happen, or at least it almost didn't get watched.

I am referring, of course, to the bizarre moment before the game when the National Anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner, was turned over to the fragile hands of Aretha Franklin to sing.  Unfortunately, she dropped it.

In my home, as in millions of others around the good old USA, the start of the game was a shared activity with the consumption of turkey, stuffing and other dishes in celebration of Thanksgiving.  So while the TV was on at the time, the rest of us were busy filling up plates with the aforementioned edibles.

At that moment, our attention turned to our plates and the associated filling up thereof, we were not paying attention to the public-address announcer introducing the anthem performance, and did not know who was doing it.  All we heard were the first attempted bars, "Oh say, can you see ..."

That part alone took, I don't know, about thirty seconds to get through, whereupon I said something like "Looks like kickoff will be delayed an hour or so for that lady to finish."  I didn't ask who it was, because I didn't care; would anyone actually care 99% of the time?

That's about when someone said  "That's Aretha Franklin!".

Oh, dear.  Unfortunately the lugubrious pace of the first few bars was matched by the equally sad, sloooooowwwwwww rest of the song.  My first thought was "Oh, man, is Fox Sports going to be mad", because they need to have these things timed to the second to allow for the erratic pace of the game itself and the need to ensure that all the commercials bought and paid for get aired in a time appropriate for the fee charged.  And I think 14 of the 22 starting players were nodding off, and the game would have to be cancelled if there were insufficient conscious players.

My second was "And you thought presidential candidates have big egos?  They're nothing compared to a former celebrity who convinces herself that people came to the game to hear her sing the anthem."  I mean, do you think that even 500 of the 60,000 or so who came to the stadium knew (or cared) who was going to be singing the anthem?  Do you think even five of the thirty million who watched on TV knew or cared?

Aside ... I am only fractionally more sensitive about all this than you, having done the anthem at numerous major-league baseball games in my remote youth and some of my middle-ageth.  And I've already complained about self-aggrandizing anthem performances in these pages.  Obviously that was to no avail.

This one was bothersome because Aretha Franklin is already a celebrity, reasonably respected, and frankly, she does not need to be a full-fledged jerk to get our attention.  In other words, she could have gone out and given a respectful, respectable performance in a minute or so, and been cheered wildly.  After all, the fans paid to see football; no one paid to see her.

Instead, we got a gospeled-up rendition that took every second of five times as long as the song should have taken.  Notes were multiplied and only occasionally was an actual note of the actual melody performed.  But then again, this was clearly not about what should be a moment of respect for our flag and our country.  It was all about Aretha Franklin, who should know better.

I suppose it should be appreciated for what it is -- an obvious attempt to give the home audience more opportunity to pile the canned corn and cranberry sauce on our plates without fearing that we were going to miss the first few minutes of the game.  For that, or at least for our gastronomic enjoyment, I imagine that we should thank her.

But as far as musicality, well, my, we're going to diverge there.  I simply don't -- even if you take away the fact that it was our national anthem at a football game -- care to hear a song with those lyrics, performed in a style so inappropriate for them.  I can't say it enough -- it was ego, ego, ego, all day.  Me, me, me, I'm going to hold every note long enough that you can say something about ME.

Music is about the story, the story that's told in the lyric line.  In this lyric, we celebrate the true but metaphoric story of the captured physician held on a British ship during a battle of the War of 1812, happy to see that the American flag was still flying over Fort McHenry the next morning.  At the same time, it is a metaphor for the leading role that the USA would have in the decades since, and that we would still be there the next morning to take our place in the world.

There was no connection between the interminable version done yesterday by Aretha Franklin and either the actual or the metaphoric message of the Star-Spangled Banner.  It was the purest and most unpleasant form of self-aggrandizement.

Oh, there will be others who think that it was wonderful, because anything done by Aretha Franklin must, a priori, be wonderful because it was done by Aretha Franklin.  As a singer of many decades, she has her fans; as a woman, and a black woman at that, she is almost impervious to criticism because in these declining days of the Obama administration, no black woman (other than Condoleezza Rice) may be criticized without accusations of racism and sexism filling the air.  Michelle Obama does, on occasion, wear ugly dresses.  You heard it here first.

I heartily disagree.  That awful performance was not wonderful no matter what color or gender the singer was.  It was terrible and inappropriate, and in these pages we call out awful for what it is -- in this case, an egotistical, self-important rendition that was more worthy of criticism for being bad musically than for its lack of respect.

But I did get enough turkey, so sure, thanks, Aretha.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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