Switched on Pop - The Star Spangled Banger!

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

Who is the biggest Diva of them all? The U.S. National Anthem, which borrows its melody from a historic British drinking song, has undergone enormous musical change in the hands of pop music vocalists. Famously, José Feliciano, Marvin Gaye and Whitney Houston each changed the meaning of "The Star Spangled Banner" by finding new approaches to the performance. Countless others have followed in their footsteps. Now every major sporting event is an excuse for pop divas to make their own creative interpretation. So who does it best? Or worst? Jan Diehm and Michelle McGhee, data journalists at The Pudding, analyzed the pitch fluctuations of over a hundred famous performances to answer these questions and more. Check out Jan and Michelle's full analysis at pudding.cool Sign up for the Switched On Pop Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Nate, I want to play for you one of the most iconic vocal performances of all time. Give it to me, Chuck. Does who's broadest stripes

and write roars? Any thoughts on this remarkable performance of the Star Spangled Banner by Maya Rudolph? iconic. It's virtuosic. It's diva-esque. It, uh, you know, is everything you want to hear from a national anthem performance. Yeah, we've got Maya Rudolph on SNL, obviously mocking the way in which many have performed the national anthem, which we just heard this Super Bowl Sunday with a remarkable performance from the great Reba McIntyre. And I thought that this would give us an opportunity to look back at some of the most over-the-top performances of the national anthem, which

is fun for us because actually, I don't know if you recall, our seventh episode ever was about the history of the song. I remember it well, Charles. We talked about its origins as a British drinking song, the hymn to anacreon. To anachryon in heaven. And we discussed its transformation by a series of path-breaking artists over the course of the 20th century. We're talking about Jose Feliciano in the 1960s. Marvin Gaye in the 1980s. Whitney Houston in the 1990s. It's a far cry from what Francis Scott Key composed back in the early 1800s. It's really transformed into something else today.

Yeah, because traditionally the song would have been performed more formally and conservatively before the 1960s, which is a time of great social upheaval, cultural change. I think that's probably because, you know, the National Anthem has a code of conduct. You're supposed to, if you're in the military or a veteran, salute the flag. As citizens, we're asked to stand at attention, remove our hats, and put our hands to our hearts. Yet, in the 1960s and throughout time, pop stars have decided to put their own flair on this national song. And so, given the timing of the Super Bowl, I thought it would be fun to revisit and think about who has performed the national anthem. Most creatively.

Who is the biggest diva, essentially, is what we're asking. Yeah, exactly. Who's the biggest diva? All right. So to help us answer that question, I have brought along data. journalist from The Pudding, who have asked just this question, who has given the most hutspa, given the most diva performance of all time of the national anthem. Please welcome Jan Diem.

Hi, all. And Michelle McGee. Hi. So you've all done a comprehensive study of contemporary performances of the national anthem. Other than Maya Rudolph on SNL, is there one that stands out from all the rest as the greatest diva performance? It's absolutely shock a con. It's from the 2020 NBA All-Star Game.

Oh, say, can you... She is just all over the place. The notes are up, and they're down. And she takes each phrase and makes it her own. Okay, that's beautiful. I mean, wildly creative, plays with the pitches, goes all over the places, but also just, like, really well-done performance. This is just one of nearly 200 performances that you have. have cataloged and created what you call a diva score. Can you explain what this is and how you did it?

Yes. So the diva score attempts to quantify the distance between a given performance and a very standard no frills performance. So we have a recording of like the notes in the most basic way you can imagine. And then we have all these other performances who are doing all these different things. From all of these performances, we've extracted like the pitch data, so sort of the frequency over time. And you can imagine a line that's going up and down with whether they're singing higher and lower. And we have basically these shapes that the performers are making with these different phrases they're singing. We've then used some fancy data thing called dynamic time warping, which allows us to basically compare these shapes to each other and get like a distance

between them. So if they're singing very different notes than the standard, they'll get a higher score. And if they're singing notes that are very similar to the standard, they'll get a lower score. It's sort of a similarity score, a difference score. But we've named it the diva score could also be thought of as like a chaos metric of like how different are you from a very basic performance, melodically? is kind of the key there, because obviously there's also a time element of, like, they might be singing at different tempos, but what this particular statistical tool,

the dynamic time-warping does is it kind of neutralizes the time component. So it's just looking like, is the melodic shape you're making similar or different from the standard, regardless of if, like, you're singing it a little bit faster or a little bit slower? This is an incredibly meticulous, painstaking method to basically quantify how extra someone is being in their performance of the national anthem. And to be clear, I appreciate it. I think this is an important statistical breakthrough that you're offering. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. And so what we're talking about when you say diva score, we're talking about deviation from the norm. There is a standard performance, which is the set of pitches that was established by the national anthem and the amount that you deviate from it,

no matter how well you deviate from it. Correct. There are lots of things that doesn't measure. It doesn't measure creativity. It purely measures deviation from the norm melodically, which does surface some really interesting, like, crazy, like fun and good and bad, all sorts of different, like, subjective feelings we can get from the performances, but they're definitely chaotic. Okay, so you've taken performances since the 1970s from major events like national holidays, sporting events, political events like inaugurations, R&C, DNC, these kind of places. And you have run them through your magical data wizardry that we don't fully understand,

but I'm going to trust you there. And you've discovered that the biggest diva is Shaka Khan. But maybe another way of thinking about this performance is to do a line-by-line analysis of who is the most diva in each line of the national anthem. So you've separated the Star-Spangled Banner

into its 16 key phrases and isolated the vocals from all the background sharing a noise. We'll hear a little bit of digital artifacting in these clips. And what I want to do is listen through each phrase and find the most diva moments that we can identify. Beginning with, of course, number one, oh, say, can you see? What should we expect to hear at the beginning? I think it's going to be pretty tame. You know, the real fireworks of the anthem don't come until you get to that line of like the bombs bursting in

air. There's a very, you know, kind of, it tracks. It's just a mirror of what, people are saying. And so the Ose can you see is maybe a little bit timid or cautious, hopeful, but it's probably, you know, it's one of the lower Diva scores overall. Okay, this makes sense. You have to respect the material and introduce it as people know it before you can go all over the place. I grabbed two examples from your database. One is Hunter Hayes at the World Series in 2016. Pretty standard. I hear in the O a little bit of extra pitch information. Put a little sauce on it. Oh, say.

Whoa. Yeah. What was that, Charlie? We can't get through this conversation without having to give your best imitations of the performance. I call Fergie because it'll be easy. All right. This is Fergie's infamous performance from the 2018 NBA All-Star Game. Okay, she gives us a couple of notes at the end that are kind of correct. The beginning is a mess. Say is definitely like flat or whatever. You know, it's not in tune, but she's following the shape.

Right, right. If we were to chart the standard shape, what the sheet music says, it's like, you know, we start somewhere, we go down to and then we go up a couple. That's the shape that she's taking as well generally. So pretty much everyone gets a pretty little. low diva score for this phrase. It's rare that someone is like significantly deviating here. With one exception, of course, which is Shaka Khan from the NBA All-Star game from 2020, which we heard earlier. Shaka.

Get it. Yeah. Okay. So most people keeping it tame, Shaka's going to just blow our mind all throughout the performance. Let's go to line two, by the dawn's early light. I'm assuming we're still at the beginning of the song by the Dawn's Early Light, not too much creativity. What are we going to hear?

Same deal. I think the first two phrases, especially, are pretty tame. The one that does surface to the top, I believe Anthony Hamilton's 2019 NBA All-Star Game performance also gets the high score for this phrase in particular. He just like really changed the melody. Like so he, so it's makes sense. sense that he would get a very different score. He's kind of ad-libbing out into the distance far away from the original notes. That's just a different melody.

It's nice. It's a far-away interpretation, which would get you a high deviation score. Okay, so he gives us the biggest diva score for Line 2, but I want to play one particularly notable performance. I think Chris Stapleton just gives a lovely take of By the Dawn's Early Light at the Super Bowl 2023. A little blues note in there. He kind of scoops up into each note. Nice little vibrato. A little diva-esque. That scoop is something that you'll see kind of a lot in the data, especially for country stars. Stapleton has the scoop. And sometimes on the female country

stars, there'll be kind of like a little vocal cry at the end that you'll hear. Just a little voice break. Okay, let's look for the scoop and the vocal cry. These are key elements in being a diva. Country diva, Charlie. Or it's a kind of a cool thing that you can see basically because we are like charting the pitch basically. Sometimes there are these like weird shapes and you're like, why is that happening? And it's, oh, okay, they're kind of creating this high frequency for a second and then like dropping down or starting low and scooping up. Oh, okay. Kind of like an Alanis Morissette-style yodel. I feel like country stars

will sometimes give us that so a, ooh, kind of thing. Or, whoa, so are you scooping up or scooping down? All right, let's see what we hear in line three. What So Proudly We Hailed. I'm assuming proud and hailed

could give us some great opportunities for creative interpretation. Let's check out Luke Bryan's performance from Super Bowl 2017. See if we get any of that country scoop. What's so proudly we had? Nice. Tasteful. Nate, you too technically scoop?

Not sure about the scoop factor, but definitely putting his own spin on the hailed, right? Haled, given it like. That was great. Oh, thank you. Well, thank you, Michelle. Adding some extra notes there. So he's, I feel like that's a bit of, that's a, you know, a bit of a deviation. As the resident Southerner here, there's a little bit of scoop in there on the pronunciation of that,

what? So it's like, I heard it just on that one. When you go like white or whale or. What? Like you're really elite. What? To put it into it.

Whitney. Wherewithal. It's there. You just got to know what you're listening for. What so proudly we have? What? Yeah. You'll hear it a lot in the next raise, actually.

Okay. Before we check out line four and the big scooper. I definitely would like to listen to one of the latest performances of Fantasia singing at the college football national championships in 2024. I feel like the way that she sings hailed. It's just lovely. No, Fantasia, man. She's just having a year, like really getting her come up from American Idol era. What do you think stands out about that performance?

Well, she's taking it one step further than Luke Bryan, because Luke Brian gave us, Hailed. He gave us these extra notes that descended downward. Fantasia then brings it backs up. Hailed. So it's like down up. Taking even more liberties, doing a similar thing to Luke Brian, but then like taking even further. It's lots of sauce, mayonnaise and mustard.

I feel like this is a good example of where the performance is trying to match the words when she sings proudly, you can hear the pride come through in the vibrato. There's lots of other creative approaches to the national anthem, I think we're going to hear many of them. We're like, I don't know why you're making that choice right now, but these choices, they work for me. Important consideration, yeah. Obviously, in contrast to the much cited famous performance of Fergie at the NBA All-Stars, maybe a little bit too proud. What's so proud? There's a fine line between pride and overconfidence.

But not deviating. As Jan and Michelle pointed out, it's like she's hitting all the notes you expect. She's just... She's hit the notes. She's got that cry. You can kind of hear the cry at the beginning of each of those descending notes,

but it's like... Hitting the notes? Around the notes. She's aiming for the proper notes. It's rough hearing those isolated vocals. You can really... Yeah. You're very exposed.

Yeah. All right, moving on number four at the twilight's last gleaming. You say this is the site of the big scoopers. Let's listen to John Legend from the NBA All-Stars 2013 and see what he's scooping up. At the twilight's last gleaming. A little bit of scoop. I think Scotty, I remember Scotty McCreary being like the king of scoop.

All right. Scottie McCurry, World Series 2011. At the twilight's last gleaming. You found him. Oh, man. That was a double scoop. And once again, one of the super divas, Anthony Hamilton. At the twilight that's gleaming.

Oh, bluesy. I like it. This song seems to give everybody the opportunity to have a little bit of a southern vibe going, Twilight. You know a little twang and scoop at the same time on Twilight. Chris Stapleton, what say you? At the twilight. I'll keep moving through this song.

Yeah, we're only a quarter of the way through. I feel like we've got a lot of embellishments to get through here. Yeah, this is definitely the least deviation quarter. It's just going to exponentially increase from here. I think actually this next phrase has our biggest one yet if you play Aretha Franklin's. Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars? Here's Aretha Franklin, 1993 World Series. Shut up.

STFU, that was... I got to hear that one more time, Charles. Who's raw, stripes, bright star. Michelle, if I remember correctly, you're not just a data journalist, but you also have experience playing a horn. Yeah, we played the saxophone. Do you catching any sort of like horn-like vibe that sort of climbing up and down the,

scale. Yeah. I like that parallel. She's really like using the instrument of the voice, like going up there. Yeah, it does almost sound kind of like a sax. It's so hard to do what she just did. I don't want to even try. I mean, Aretha is the bar. Oh, my. Aritha is the bar. Okay. I feel like this line also sets up the opportunity for some real strong text painting where we align the words and the music, the words broad, stripes, and bright stars. You know, you can get really creative with them. How about Usher at the NBA finals in 2015? Whose roll the stripes and bright star? I like that one.

We get it, Usher. You're a star. Casual. You can give it a little extra. Twinkled. There. Make it bright. Well, twinkle, yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like he was channeling a little bit of Marvin Gay's 1980s, All-Star Game performance right there. Totally. You can hear a lot of that one, like, showing up, those riffs showing up in different places later on. Oh, interesting. Those broad stripes and bright star.

So that's cool, too, because it's like with certain of these lines, they might be referencing previous iconic performances. Marvin Gay, I imagine Whitney Houston in the, what would the 1991 Super Bowl? I feel like these probably run through many of the interpretations of the national anthem that will encounter. For sure. All right, let's keep on going through number six, through the perilous fight. You all picked as the most diva in this moment, Jasmine Sullivan singing at the World Series in 2022. Through the perilous fight.

Who. Slight correction, which is that she didn't receive like the highest diva score. We just like picked her as like our favorite, basically. Yeah. Wait, so there's some discrepancy here. Like that performance feels like huge diva vocal, but it's not. Is it? I mean, yeah, she's definitely deviating and she gets a decently high diva score.

But it's not the top. There are people who are doing more chaotic things. But I think this is an example to me. this is just my personal favorite performance of the dataset, and I think it's very creative. I like it for all these, like, subjective reasons. There's an issue here that if you are sticking to the pitches as written, but you're giving them some extra vibrato, a little molysma here and there,

you might be less deviating than maybe Shaka Khan or Anthony Hamilton, who are just kind of creating their own melodies from the original. And so Jasmine Sullivan is maybe more respectful of the original material, even though it's a highly creative performance. Let's see what happens when things start to really blow up in the national anthem. We're going to line number seven or the ramparts we watched. Important question. What are ramparts?

You tell me. Professor? It's a street in L.A. that I drive on sometimes to get Chinese food. I think it's like military barracks, kind of, maybe? Yes. Defensive wall. A defensive wall. I think I did know that, actually.

But I didn't want to say it to be wrong. So thanks, Jan. So what's happening all over the ramparts? Let's hear how it is interpreted by Jewel at the NBA All-Star 2023, very diva performance. Whoa. She like flies over the ramparts. I don't know if I've, that's very unique. Like, you come to hear certain riffs repeatedly and you can kind of recognize them or expect.

them. Yeah. That, I don't know how much I like it necessarily, but it's definitely unique and original. Very, uh, like, foking it up a little bit. Totally. She, she was given like, uh, like, almost like an Irish, uh, singer, songwriter vibe there. If I had to predict how Jule would sing it, that would be pretty close. Like, I'm like, you know, you can pinpoint like that's 100% Jewel.

And I think, like, that's another thing is that, you know, we've listened to over 100 plus hours of anthems. And so it all bleeds into each other. You know, you think you'd get tired of it, but the little bits like that that are unique keep you kind of like coming back and being like, oh, I can hear this a different way than I've heard it my entire life.

Yeah, it's so strange that I'll be humming it as like a little medley of all the different ones and my favorite version of each phrase or whatever. Like, it's just like in my brain. Each one is a refreshing take on it. And, you know, maybe if you're confused about some of these lines and you want to give it your own spin, sometimes you can really take it out of the park,

like Christina Aguilera at the Super Bowl in 2011. What's so proudly we watched. Supposed to be or the ramparts we watched. What happened? I mean, we see this a couple times where it's the mirror of the first half where we said, What So Proudly We Hailed. Now we say, or the ramparts we watched. So sometimes people double back by accident

or kind of forget where they are. Eric Burton's performance, I believe, does the same thing where he just goes straight back to What So Proudly We Hailed for the second time. What's so proudly we hail. So, I don't know, it's nerve-wracking up there probably. It's hard to remember all the things, but it is kind of funny.

No doubt, yeah. Yeah, Eric Burton did get a bunch of flack for messing up the lyrics at his 2022 World Series performance. Okay, we've arrived. Here we are. Number eight, we're so gallantly streaming. Gallantly streaming. What a great opportunity for creative vocal approaches.

And maybe no better than T. Paines at a L.A. Dodgers game back in 2015, which ranks very high on your Diva score. We're so gallantly streaming. Ooh, T-Pain. And T-Pain's entire performance is kind of filled with these little gems, you know. Take the auto-tune away. and man, this is what you get. Absolutely. He really takes that melody in his own direction,

but not in a way that is distracting. I mean, Nate, you literally came out. He's like, whoa. Yeah, it's like Michelle and Jan were pointing out earlier. Some of these reinterpretations are so surprising that they kind of stop you in your tracks a little bit. All right. We've made it halfway through,

and this is where things are truly going to explode right after the break. Who is the biggest diva? Maria, you have a podcast. and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough.

Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights.

from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. And we've arrived when the rockets go off and explode and the rockets red glare line number nine. I'm assuming things are going to get big here. Do you have any particular performance you'd like to call out? Stephen Tyler. That's what I was thinking to.

Okay. Okay. Here's Stephen Tyler at the Indianapolis 500 in 2001. Ah, bro. Y'all, this is so hard to sing. It's so high. Yeah, this is mind-blowing. Most of the women sing it in the key of F-sharp.

And that's kind of like, that's the most common key in our data set. That's what Whitney sang it in in 1991, I believe. That's like, I feel like that's kind of what you're, aiming for as like a female diva and like some people go like a whole step or a half step below but like f sharp is kind of like very dominant there are a couple people who go higher including step tyler step is singing this in g is singing this a half step above the like most common like female diva key that like dina manzel is singing it in that's wild like b flat the b flat below that f sharp is the most common key for the men in our data set to be singing the

and he is like almost a full octave above them. Yeah, your data points out that some male performers are going to give themselves a lot of room by choosing a much lower key so that by the time they reach this high moment, they're not going to break their voice. For example, Trace Adkins sings as low as the key of D at the R&C 2020. Which might help us performance, but maybe doesn't actually help the emotion of. this moment because it doesn't feel like it's exploding like Stephen Tyler. You mentioned a number of the female divas. I think one that really stood out for me on your divas score was Patty LaBelle at the World Series in 2008. Yeah.

Whoa. That's the highest key in our dataset. That's in the QA. Way to go, Patty. So that's a whole step above Stephen Tyler's, step and a half above the standard F-sharp. Wow. And she takes it up, like, then she's holding out the notes. It's wild.

Amazing. All right. Let's do it. The bombs bursting in air. Fphrase 10. All right. Who should we listen to? Maybe Shaka Khan, because she gets the top diva spot for this phrase.

Wow. That just kept going. I feel like her performance is the closest to the spirit of the Maya Rudolph performance, which is like, can we do as many things as possible in as condensed to space as possible? It borders to me on, like, unnecessary, but you know, it's definitely entertaining. Shaka score is, you know, that beautiful moment where the quantitative data, so the numbers of the Diva score, match the qualitative or like how your heart feels when you're listening to a phrase. That's wonderful. Yeah, I feel like the way that she's singing about the bombs bursting in air, it almost sounds like that

kind of sound. She's also singing this acapella, I believe, and so that probably contributes to her higher divaness, because she's She's milking everything possible out of every phrase. There's no band behind her that she needs to like stick with. So that actually makes it pretty different from some of the others, where they just don't have as much time to like add this, whereas she'll take these phrases like seven seconds longer than they would normally if there was some sort of backing track. Okay, so the piece here goes from the relatively explosive bomb was bursting in air

to a much simpler calm phrase, line 11 gave proof through the night. despite the simplicity of this downward motion stepping down the scale, this is also a key moment in your analysis looking at people who have performed the National Anthem multiple times. This is a key moment that we can identify if someone is creative and a diva

in their own right every single time they perform it, or if they kind of do the same thing every time and you specifically call out Demo Lovato. Yeah, so each time it's like pretty different from the next, which is cool. Like she does it in different keys and does different riffs on different parts. This phrase, I think, showcases that pretty well.

There's one point where she takes proof, just like, I can't even do it because it's dimmy. But, you know, really high and then kind of back down. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you got to play those. Yeah, that one, I think, gets the near the top divas score from all the performances. But she doesn't do that every time.

Like, in their other ones, they're, like, more subdued. In contrast to someone like Carrie Underwood, who really stood out, as we were listening, as someone who sings it like basically the exact same way each time. Copy paste. We have four performances of her. And you can see in the lines of like the pitch,

they're just such similar shapes and it's really interesting. So we did this extra little analysis of like comparing singers to themselves and giving them a sort of intra-performer diva score of like how similar are they to them. themselves when they re-sing the songs. The same way she like comes into each note, it's like very exactly the same. Through the night, like making the have kind of like these two little beats and like it's like exactly. Exactly same. All right.

So here's an opportunity coming into the final third of the song. Are you getting creative? Are you keeping it simple? And let's see what folks do on line 12 that our flag was still there. Let's check out, for example, Beyonce's performance at the 2013 inauguration. Jan. Yeah, I mean, I was actually lucky enough to be at this performance.

So this is one of those ones that's like super close to me and just remembering the feeling of it. And I think the word flag here is key, right? Because the inauguration, the flag's flying. This is the phrase that like really hits home. So it's rare that the inauguration is one of those moments or at least one of the events that has high diva scores because it's usually restrained and a little bit more pomp and circumstance than, you know, regular sporting events.

But in our top divas score for this phrase, there's two inaugurations. There's this Beyonce one, and then years later, Lady Gaga's. Here's Lady Gaga from the 2021 inauguration. Not very diva, but very impressive. Yeah. And, I mean, following the sort of similar melodic arc that Beyonce had taken with it in 2013, but contextually, the emotional power of the flag still being there, this is in January 2021, and in people's mind is probably still the insurrection that had happened at the Capitol.

And so the flag still being there in this moment of performance, I think takes on a much greater meeting. I guess rather than drop down and... Yeah, it's all an octave up, which is why... End our flag was still there. Rather than dropping down, she keeps going, and our flag. like, was still there? It's like, oh, that's very emphatic. That's the key thing that's giving them high scores

because they're creating this distance of like an octave from what the standard melody would be. This is sometimes like a moment, I feel like to like catch your breath a little bit and like, you know, you went a little hard in the last couple of phrases. This one's just like, well, still there in the regular thing. And then you're going to go hard on the next one. But I feel like in the inaugurations, like Jan said, they tend to be more tame, more conservative, more traditional.

And like this, so this is kind of like their moment to be a bit sparkly and taking it up the octave kind of gives that. It's not too chaotic, but it gives it the power that it needs in this moment. Usually this phrase is kind of more like of relief. Like, oh, thank goodness, the flag is still there. But, you know, with this, it's like a triumphant, like, you know, and the flag. It's there, y'all. It's there. Go look at it.

All right. we're coming into the home stretch of the national anthem. O'Say does that star spangled. Line number 13. And if you don't want, I'd like to stay for a second with Lady Gaga, but go back to her 2016 Super Bowl performance. Oh, say, star spangled. That was wild.

I kind of love that one. That one gets me. It's good. It's like you can hear the glitter on the star. Star Spangled. That's so triumphant. I feel like I have to like pump my fist in there. when it's like, does spangles.

It's very fun. Charlie, can we go to the Fergie tape of this moment? Oh, does that's star spangled? Oh, it's tough. There are several times throughout all the anthems where I just keep asking myself, like, Fergie, girl, what are you doing? This is definitely the top of that list. This is the only time Fergie, I think, gets in our top three of, like, diva score.

Because, as we said before, she's mostly trying to sing the melody. But this is where she really lets loose. This is her moment of embellishment. Oh, my God. And I agree with Jan's assessment. I think there's also the moment where some of the NBA players start to, you know, visibly have a hard time not laughing while standing on the court during this performance. All right, let's take this to the end.

We've got line 14, banner yet wave, which has, I should say, built in malisma, because over the word yet, we have multiple pitches, yet wave, over yet and wave. So let's see what they do with it. Let's go to Kelly Clarkson at the World Series in 2010. Michelle, why did you choose Kelly Clarkson as your critics pick? Not the most diva, but one of your favorite performances. Yeah, I just, I mean, she has three or four performances in our data set. Tends to be pretty similar to herself and pretty low on the Diva score spectrum.

But I feel like this moment is her, like, you know, showcasing her amazingly strong voice and, like, taking that up an octave and holding that note out strong. So I always like some of that. Your top picks here, we've seen before, Shaka Khan gives a great performance. Both Kelly Clarkson and Shaka Khan are showing us. different ways that the banner can wave. Like I feel like, in Kelly Clarkson's example, it's a quick wind, you know, like a snappy little wave on the flag,

and Shakaka Khan's flag is flying everywhere. It's like, it's blown off. Superstorm. You also chose as a critics pick here, Christina Aguilera's Super Bowl performance 2011. This is a happy medium for you all between Shaka Khan and Kelly Clarkson? It's a lot. Personally, I feel like the vibe she's giving is like,

This is after she'd messed up the words and maybe probably knew it or something. I feel like there's a little bit of overcompensation. Of like, I got to like get back on track. But also it's cool. Like it's definitely in between the Shaka Khan and the Kelly Clarkson. All right. She's trying to take it home. Yeah.

I mean, here's the thing. Unlike the beginning where things are maybe a little more calm and steady, the final two lines, people just completely let loose. So let's go line 15 or the land of the free. And one of the most diva performances, according to your database, is Renee Fleming, an opera singer, performing a Super Bowl 2014. What's really cool with her and kind of other classically or Broadway-trained singers is in that pitch line you'll see the vibrato, you know? And sometimes the vibrato is kind of spread out. It's like a wide kind of undulating line.

But when you get to these classical singers, it just becomes. like a tightly wound coil. Hmm. Hmm. So a lot of control of the vibrato. I feel like it's the appropriate thing to do. The flag is waving. We're feeling free.

I also like listening to this one because you can hear Renee Fleming using the same upward jump that Whitney Houston introduced in her Super Bowl performance. Land of the Free, that little additional, you know, pager there. Which is cool because she's doing this classical version, but she's still referencing, like, this iconic pop rendition. So I just like hearing the meeting of those worlds there. Love that. Interesting. Opera meets Whitney Houston, and it's deviating from the traditional performance, but it's actually adhering to another iconic one.

This is the opportunity where you can let Freedom ring. On the top of your diva score here, we have Nicole Scherzinger at the World Series in 2019. Yep, that checks out. She does the Whitney bump and then some. And then one more bump, yeah. It's really cool on the chart to see the, you can see most people stay at the prescribed pitch at one octave. Then a lot of people do that Whitney jump up on free.

I feel like that's a very well-known deviation. And then, yeah, I think Nicole might stand alone doing that third bump. All right, we've arrived line 16 and the home of the brave. Jan, why don't you just explain to hear what goes on at the end? So this is a huge climax of the whole song. You know, the final phrase, a lot of times it's accompanied by big trumpets and drums or like even a jet flyover, fireworks. This is where the divas bring it. All right.

I feel like there's so many deviations that happen here. There's no one that could be the most deviating. Can we all just choose one favorite performance? I'll begin with Moriah Carey at the Super Bowl 2002. Goosebts. Wow. Beautiful. Michelle, what do you got?

I think the one I keep, I gravitate towards in our top, like, diva scores for this one, is Alicia Keys. I forget where she's performing it. It's, I think, Super Bowl 2013. She really just milks it. also singing up high in the key of G. Jan, bring us home. We haven't mentioned this performer yet, but Gladys Knight, classic diva,

and she brings it on this one. Gladys Knight, Super Bowl 2019. Wow. Dr. Sloan, final performance. We've heard a little bit of this one already, but I was pretty blown away by Patty. LaBelle's finale from the 2008 World Series. Like, if I could sing like that, that's how I would sing the end of this anthem, I think.

Yeah, you got to milk it. I love at the end there, the pitch is so high and screaming that the AI auto separation technology cannot determine it from the background cheers and starts to fade out an artifact. It's just so powerful. Wow. What a time. Okay. So we have gone through all 16 lines.

There's definitely been a handful of folks that we keep hearing a lot of. We have the pat of the bells, obviously, Chaka Khan. Anthony Hamilton, Lady Gaga, Beyonce. People who we might call divas in their own right. I want to just look at a couple of key takeaways here. Michelle, say someone's being asked to sing the national anthem at an event. We now have all this data to suggest how you might want to perform that piece. at what location is it okay to be the most over the top in your performance?

Yeah, so we separated these events into some categories. There's obviously sporting event things like the Super Bowl or the World Series, and then there's political events, and then I think those are the main types. We also split out the sports. We found that basketball is the number one arena for high diva scores, followed very closely by football, with political events being a lot lower, and that kind of checks out.

You'd expect at the inauguration for it to be like a little more restrained, but at the Super Bowl, we're all excited to hear what crazy things people are going to do. But I feel like really the NBA All-Star game, that's where Shaka Khan, that's where Fergie, that's where Marvin Gay performed.

So all of the ones that really come to mind immediately for me is the most chaotic and experimental tend to be at those basketball games. And we have artists working in different, genres. Depending on the genre that you're in, is it going to influence how you might want to sing the national anthem? Yeah, this also ended up kind of checking out with what you might intuitively think, giving every artist in the dataset a genre of sort of like what their music is, not necessarily what a genre were deeming their performance to be. The R&B artists had the highest

like average diva score among them, which is probably what I would have guessed with country singers and more like classical singers having lower diva scores on average. So that kind of checks out with just those styles of music. Right. Classical country, more conservative approaches to singing the national anthem, R&B, pop, more creative. I love doing this microscopic breakdown of the way that singers put their own spin on the anthem. Because when you think about this piece of music, I mean, in some ways it's kind of weird. Like you go to a big sporting event and you might think that everyone in the audience would sing the anthem together, but that's not how we do it here in the United States. We give it to one person. We give them this very hard song to sing, and we

cheer when they do well, and we boo them sometimes when they don't. And it's probably reflective of the very individualistic ethos that, you know, undergirds the founding of this country for better or worse. But what I like about this study is when you explore and celebrate and dissect how each singer puts their own special interpretation on this piece, it makes me appreciate it a little bit more because it's like, in some ways, it's, it's, you could interpret it as saying, okay, here's this anthem that we've been given. It has all these issues. It's militaristic. In later verses, it's like downright racist. It, it, it, It's not, I don't know, it's not what I would pick probably as a national anthem,

but when these singers do it in their own way and put their own spin on it, it's almost like saying, like, I am going to claim this, I'm going to make it into something that I can be proud of. And like, that's kind of a nice way to think about this country because it's messed up in so many ways, but you can step back and you can say, this is the America that I envision, that I want to see. And I'm giving it to you in this performance with all of my molysmas and sauce. and sometimes flat notes, but it's all there.

And I think that's beautiful. Okay, I'm going to step off my soapbox now. I think that's beautiful and perfect. I love how you articulated that. Yeah, it's really just like a canvas for so much potential creativity. Like, it's a hard song to sing, but it's also like we've heard it so many times. So the challenge of trying to like bring your personality or originality or even like your worldview or your, like, your worldview or your, like, like hopes for the world into the song is like, it's very like ripe for that.

Well, Michelle and Jan, thank you so much for doing this enormous study to help us realize that, yes, Shaka Khan is the number one diva, but there are so many diva ways of approaching this performance line by line. If you want to go and hear all of these performances and more, literally like every single line, split up by phrase with visuals about how much it deviates, You should head over to pudding dot cool, and you can hear all these performances line by line. It's so much fun. Thank you, Michelle and Jan, for this deep dive into the Star Spangled Banner, our national anthem. It's been a blast.

Thanks so much for having us. This was really fun to go deep on together. Living in the home of the brave. This episode of Switched on Pop was made by me, Charlie Harding. The show's producer is Rihanna Cruz, edited by Art Chung, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, engineering by Brandon McFarlane. Community management by Abby Barr and Nishat Koura is our executive producer. Remember of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine, which you can subscribe to at new yorkmag.com slash pot.

Thanks again to Jan and Michelle from The Pudding for joining us today. Find us on social media at Switch on Pop and tell us what your favorite, weirdest, most surprising national anthem performances are. Is it when Michael Bolton has the lyrics written on his hand and has to pause and look down? mid-antham and the entire audience starts booing him or is it perhaps when Whitney Houston hits the final home of the brave as the arrangement by the legendary Ricky minor beneath her moves up by whole steps back to the tonic and fighter jets fly overhead sorry I'm getting carried away but we want to know and while we're on

the topic of extra I want you to check out our switch on pop newsletter. Go to the website, swish onpop.com, go to the show notes. You can register there, and we will burst into the air of your inbox. You see what I did there, Charlie, with additional musical logical insights from the week, the music that our team is listening to. It's a lot of fun. It's a great read. And it's just once a week. It's not too much. So, yeah, newsletter. All right. We'll be back next Tuesday. And until then, thanks for listening. Attention Spotify! Has arrived the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline Herrera,

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