ike almost all my fellow players, I make it a point to never criticize other musicians in public. What would be the point? What kind of performance, no matter how dismal, would ever warrant it?
Now I know.
I didn't catch last night's NBA all-star game, but, after reading some of the backlash about Fergie's rendition of the national anthem, I caught it tonight on YouTube.
There is no existing statute that covers a rape of The Star Spangled Banner. We might want to reconsider that after last night, but the reality is that Fergie won't do jail time for her musical mugging of Francis Scott Key.
I have no problem with singers taking creative liberties with the national anthem. One of my favorite performances of that old British alehouse melody is Marvin Gaye's gorgeous, totally untraditional version at the 1983 NBA all star game.
We Americans are suffering through a grim period in which too many of us are confusing the United States and patriotism with ourselves instead of celebrating that the country belongs to all of us. Last night Fergie took the national anthem to an utterly personal place. Unfortunately, that place turned out to be not an artist's stage but a seamy karaoke-bar platform under the cheap lights where, at five minutes before closing, a would-be chanteuse with eight tequila shooters under her belt desperately tries to score points with the last guy left at the bar.
Fergie doesn't deserve condemnation for being a cosmically godawful singer. She's not the first vocalist to try to go to soul town without knowing what that even means, much less how to get there. And it's not a crime that the national anthem clearly means absolutely nothing to her personally. What earns her our lasting scorn is that she had no clue that the bar song she was sleazing her way through (she did every low trick short of simulating oral sex with the mic) was a song that actually meant something to everybody else in the room. This profoundly disturbed woman needs to go away somewhere for a few years and give the country enough time away from her to drive all memory of last night's assault from our collective consciousness.