Mark Anthony Neal

Critical Noir

Star-Spangled Freak

Posted 06/14/2007 at 11:42 AM | Comment?

There's not been much to watch during this year's NBA Finals, as Tim Duncan and the lunch-pail ethos that defines his team's style of play has made for dreadful entertainment. The one breakthrough moment occurred as Ben Harper freaked the "Star Spangled Banner" on his slide guitar prior to Game 3. In another era, Harper's performance might have elicited some derision (though I don't know if Bill O'Reilly has weighed in yet), but at a moment when many Americans are feeling dislocated and disaffected, Harper's angular rendition spoke to the vertigo of the moment.

Of course, Harper was just tapping into a larger tradition of artists who have performed unique versions of the "Star-Spangled Banner" before major sporting events. Perhaps the most well known was Jose Feliciano's version, performed at Detroit's Tiger Stadium prior to a 1968 World Series game between the Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals. Performed at the height of anti-Vietnam protests, the version by the Puerto Rican-born Feliciano resonated among those pushing for a new version of American democracy and raised the ire of those who thought his highly idiosyncratic version was unpatriotic.

Nearly twenty-years later, it was Marvin Gaye who freaked the national anthem at the 1983 NBA All-star game at the LA Forum, with a drum machine, a reggae-styled backbeat and all the Soul-man swagger he could muster. It was a moment where Black Americans--and more than a few others--could again make a claim on American style democracy, by highlighting the pluralism that makes such a democracy work, especially as Reagan-era domestic policies put many people at risk. Performing a little more than a decade after his seminal protest recording "What's Going On," this was Gaye's last stand. A year later he would be dead, murdered by his father. That the NBA saw fit to revisit Gaye's moment, by staging a digitized duet between Gaye and his daughter Nona at the 2004 highlights how the radical underpinnings of Gaye's performance have been gutted from the popular imagination.

Ben Harper likely took his cue from Jimi Hendrix, who Woodstock inspired performance of the song in 1969, still brings into focus the jagged edges of this thing called America.

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