Right there with you.

“Lots of bombs in the air” is where the wheels really start to come off, so I’ll go with that part.

Yeah that seems to be the problem, people start too high and leave themselves nowhere to go but embarrassment city.

USA! USA! USA!

People get fired up just hearing a singer nail key change, I don’t know that added flair is what they should be going for.  Just belt it out with feeling and the place will go nuts.  Play ball!

It really is the best. I’ll give ‘em that.

James Morrison, who rather unfortunately played an old Spanish Republican anthem - not heard since the 1930s - at the Davis Cup, causing rather a lot of Spanish dignitaries to storm out.

Dude’s a legit prodigy.

Who is that?

Thing is, that first stanza is the worst part. Hearing the whole thing at once, it sounded to me like a bad start that she recovered from somewhat but not completely. It was an embarrassing performance but not nearly worth the virtual ink that’s been spilled. 

Pretty sure the melody was an old drinking song, and it really does lend itself to being belted out by a crowd of yahoos rather than delivered by a singer. 

Fuck ‘em, we’ll just play the wrong one anyway. 

Wait. Do you mean to tell me that the AVClub posted an incomplete recording of this performance? FFS. Now I have to listen to it again??

....

This changes nothing. It’s still dreadful. BUT she didn’t skip any lines.

Key word being “clip”. Watch the whole thing.

We’re already confused!

It kills me that the goddamn Russian national anthem is so much better musically. Granted, it was purpose-built rather than glomming a shitty poem onto a weird and clunky composition, but still.

Totally. That “no true Scotsman”/NotAll[Whatever] shit causes endless problems because it allows people to individually disclaim anything that casts a bad light on whatever group they’re a part of.

I think part of this issue is that the music consuming public can usually only recognize volume, duration and range as praiseworthy attributes of a singer. All of the many, many other elements that make a good singer are ignored. So when vocalists want to impress a crowd they go loud and long and as low and high as…

That brings the song “Take Me Out To The Ballpark” to mind.
They should just sing that instead of this horrible dirge.

She deserves all she gets from this. She skipped lines, mangled the melody, made bad choices and doubled down on them. It was as fractured and insane as this country right now. It was terrible, yet feels perfectly appropriate. This should be the way it is sung for all time.