Having firmly established myself as something of a curmudgeon, it should come as no surprise to anyone that I found Idina Menzel’s Super Bowl performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” somewhat less than satisfactory. Better than Carrie Underwood’s jaw-droppingly stupid theme song, to be sure, but that’s admittedly a pretty low bar.
At least Menzel had some respect for our national anthem, though. The fine folks at Popbitch have analyzed some of the more memorable performances over the last 25 years, and, well…let’s just say that restraint doesn’t come immediately to mind when describing them.
Here they compare Mariah Carey’s 2002 performance with what Christina Aguilera unleashed on an unsuspecting crowd nine years later:
“Look at that. Just look at it. Mariah Carey is not shy about altering a melody line, but Christina Aguilera is shameless. There’s one bar left unmolested at the start of it, and then Christina starts rubbing herself all over it like she’s being sent away for a 25-to-life stretch. Triplets, quintuplets, mordents, trills, turns, six-note slides, grace notes. There’s barely a technique going that Aguilera hasn’t shoe-horned into it before she’s even got halfway through. It’s borderline obscene.”
To be fair, looking for musicality within the ranks of pop music is like looking for integrity in a politician: nobody really expects it. So let me retract my earlier statement about Menzel’s performance. Sure, she was flat toward the end, but at least she didn’t treat “the well-established and well-loved melody of the American national anthem as her plaything.”
