A Partial List Of National Anthem Screw Ups

[Initech]

Earlier this month, before the first game of the Canadian Hockey League's Memorial Cup, singer Alexis Normand joined a long list of people who have brutalized the U.S. national anthem in front of a large, tense crowd.
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Listening to this instantly immortal rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner," I'm reminded of Kevin Kline's character in "A… Read…

Normand, who's Canadian, tripped up on "through the perilous fight." She's not the first. Is this a particularly tricky part of the anthem? Where do singers generally go off the rails?

To throw some science at this, we watched a bunch of YouTube videos (n=26) to find the exact lyric where unfortunate singers first fucked up the song. (You can find those videos in the annotations to the top image.) While the actual tune of "The Star-Spangled Banner" is famously difficult to carry–it covers an octave and a half–we focused on true flubs, so the terrible but lyrically accurate renditions of Carl Lewis, Kat Deluna, Roseanne Barr, and others got a pass.

As it turns out, pretty much anything in the first half of the anthem is fuckupable, although only one poor guy (in the very worst rendition we could find) screwed up the first line. If you made it to "And the rockets' red glare" you were in great shape, and if you got as far as "That our flag was still there" you were in the clear (with another horrible exception, shown above). The danger zone seems to be a pair of lines in the middle: O'er the ramparts we watched / Were so gallantly streaming?

http://deadspin.com/where-do-singers-screw-up-the-national-anthem-509908829

[olddots]

1. It's a crappy song

It doesn't have a hook and somebody must have been boinking somebody for it to have become the National Anthem .

I say we pick a Randy Newman song for the National Anthem .

[Doc_Technical]

2. It's a terrible song and very difficult to sing.

I used to think it should be "Columbia, gem of the Ocean"

Considering how this Country has been run for the last
30 years, perhaps this song should be our National Anthem

[Callmecrazy]

3. No, no, no...

The Imperial March is what I use for my ex's phone ringer so that would just mess me up.

[Lionel Mandrake]

4. We need lyrics to make the Imperial March into our national anthem.

How's this for starters:

Fear we inspire when we show them our fist;
No other nation will dare to resist.