With the Super Bowl come all the odd bets that Vegas allows people to wager on.  The one that got my attention was the over/under on the time it will take Billy Joel to sing the National Anthem, which is currently at 1 minute, 44 seconds.  If there’s one thing I don’t like about sporting events, it’s when singers decide to drag out the anthem as long as possible.  You can tell by the second line whether you’re going to be done in 2 minutes or 3+ minutes.  I’m all for artistic expression, but leave the anthem to its basics and don’t add any notes to it, otherwise it comes across as self-serving.

There is one place in the song where I actually do like an added note that a lot of singers use and it’s not in the original song.  At the end of the line “Over the la-and of the free”, I like it when they turn the word “free” into a 2-syllable “free-EE”, hitting that high note that not everyone can hit successfully.  With the anthem being so difficult to sing with its 3 octaves, the people who can hit that “free-EE” note are the ones who usually have better renditions of the song overall.

It’s not like I’m against slight changes when the song is sung, rather I am against the “American Idol-ization” of the song, when a singer is adding syllables and notes everywhere.  If your name isn’t Anita Baker or Aretha Franklin, you’re not allowed to freestyle the anthem with additional warbling.  I think it might have been a few Super Bowls ago when Aaron Neville did a horrific interpretation of the “Star Spangled Banner”, or as I called it, the “Star Mangled Banner”.

I’ve said this before and I still contend that the “Star Spangled Banner” is a crappy anthem, lyric-wise and song-wise.  “America The Beautiful” is a much better sounding song with lyrics that are far more evocative of how wonderful our country is.  Wouldn’t you rather hear lyrics like “Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain” over “And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night, that our flag was still there” before every sporting event that you attend?