The other day in my Writing Arts Criticism class the students and I listened to a traditional version of "The Star Spangled Banner," trying to hear with fresh ears a song so familiar and unsurprising that it's something like the weather, or our own bodies that we end up taking for granted. Then we listened to several very different covers of the song, among them an acoustic performance by Victory Boyd, Hendrix scorching the earth at Woodstock, and an arrangement in which the full song was transposed to a minor key.
We listened to version each twice. Before we heard Boyd's performance for the second time, we considered the fact that she'd posted her cover to YouTube after she'd been "cancelled" (her word choice) by the NFL; she'd been scheduled, though no contract had been signed, to sing the National Anthem at an opening day game and after she'd disclosed that she'd refused a COVID vaccine shot claiming a religious exemption, the league dropped her appearance. Unbowed, she uploaded her version online "not for the theatrics of a football game" but because "this time I sang for America. To remind her who she is… the land of the free and the home of the brave," adding, "This is dedicated to anyone that has taken a stand for freedom. I stand with you." Learning this, the temperature in the room changed a bit, as my students felt compelled to reassess the hoary, dubious promises embedded in that old anthem, this time sung by an African American woman asking her listeners to consider what rights mean even if they may disagree with her stance.
Hendrix at Woodstock, unsurprisingly, set the room alight. The first time we listened I blanked the screen; the second time we listened we watched Hendrix performing. I'm fairly certain that most of my students know who Hendrix was, or know his name as uttered reverently by their parents, uncles, and aunts, but few had seen the footage. I hadn't myself in years, and was nearly moved to tears watching a black man destroy and reconstruct the national anthem at 8:30 in the morning, his playing hanging loosely from the melody, toying with it, really, before devolving into the hair-lifting sounds of screeching jet fighters, the sound of carpet bombing and the roar of disbelieving and angry resistance caught through a guitar and amplifiers on a farm in upstate New York. Hendrix's intentions, of course, especially at this point in his musical evolution, weren't punk, but the song as he deconstructs it was as pissed off and politically charged as anything the U.S. and U.K. punk bands would sneeringly deliver a decade later. Though overfamiliar, his performance never fails to startle me, but I hadn't realized that I needed a reminder of how thoroughly and thrillingly Hendrix defamiliarized the song, turning it into something frightfully new. I looked around: the students' faces registered amazement, pretty righteous stuff a half century down the line.
2 comments:
I wish this essay was longer.
Thanks, laureanne!
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