America, Crown Thy Good

I’m going to make a highly unpatriotic confession: 

I can’t stand the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

Folks get canceled these days for admitting far less, but you’ve got to admit our national anthem isn’t exactly a banger: 

All that wandering around the scale makes it notoriously hard to sing even for the most well-trained vocalists, and the most seasoned celebrities tend to flub the lyrics. The hoary old tune isn’t an American original at all, but an old British men’s club drinking ditty with bawdy references to wanting to be entwined in the “myrtle of Venus,” basically the 17th-century version of “WAP”.

It’s not even an homage to American independence. Francis Scott Key (who was reportedly tone deaf ) wrote it a generation later about the War of 1812, which we didn’t even win. Don’t even get me started on the racist controversy regarding the largely forgotten third verse. 

As a first grader reciting it with my classmates, I dreaded it. The parts about rockets and bombs made me nervous; I was still closing my eyes during car chases in The Dukes of Hazzard. Fireworks sent me scurrying under the bed like an arrhythmical chihuahua; a shame they didn’t make Thundershirts for children back then.