american national anthem lyrics racist meaning

The chords anticipate the barline in three measures out of every four-measure phrase, and they also anticipate beat three (the “invisible barline”) in the last measure in each phrase. While it’s true that the vocal melody mostly aligns with the chord changes, it is not true that Withers shuns syncopation. The lyrics are nearly all monosyllables, and in singing the verses, Withers largely shuns syncopation, letting the words fall out precisely in time with the chord changes, one syllable per chord. I do want to take small issue with one thing Cohen says: This is a song that I would sing with pride, and it represents a vision of a national community that I would want to be a part of. Now we’re talking: the song is unpretentious, communitarian, easy to sing but with room for bluesy embellishment, and gently but insistently funky.

I learned the song as a kid from Club Nouveau’s synth-heavy version, but nothing compares to the original recording: So how about we make America’s national anthem sound more like, you know, America? Jody Rosen considers various alternatives to the SSB before arriving at the only correct answer: “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers. Another problem is that both the music and lyrics sound more like the cultural heritage of our opponents in that war, the British, because it’s a British melody using archaic British phrases. It’s stirring to imagine America overcoming tremendous odds against a better-armed attacker, I guess, but when was the last time you could accurately describe us this way? Probably 1812? Now it’s just tone-deaf. Also, the War of 1812 is a weird hook to hang our national identity on.

For me, the big issue is that the SSB is a bad song: an awkward and unsingable melody with incomprehensible lyrics. Is the SSB racist? Maybe, but that isn’t the main reason to ditch it as our anthem. Francis Scott Key owned slaves, and the third verse of the song belittles the British soldiers as “hireling and slave.”

The conversation inevitably turned toward “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with some questions about its appropriateness as a national anthem. Over the summer, with the BLM protests raging, my fellow music educators were doing a lot of soul-searching about the more problematic items in the traditional repertoire.

American national anthem lyrics racist meaning