Revisiting Whitney Houston's radical reclamation of 'The Star-Spangled Banner'

But maybe the best descriptor is this: radical.

When Houston, clad in an unembellished yet no less iconic white tracksuit, stepped onto the field at Tampa Stadium in Florida to sing the national anthem, she didn’t merely kick off one of the most-watched television programs in the US. She took an ode to freedom that was never created with Black liberation in mind — and reclaimed it.

Three decades on, with the country engaged in a fresh reckoning with racial hierarchies, Houston’s performance feels just as inspiring as it must have been in 1991.

To understand the significance of Houston’s performance, reflect on Tony Kushner’s masterpiece, “Angels in America,” which premiered the same year. One scene exquisitely captures Black Americans’ frequently skeptical stance toward the US.

“I hate this country. It’s just big ideas and stories and people dying and people like you,” says Belize, a Black ex-drag queen. “The White cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high, nobody can reach it.”

Houston reached it, though. In fact, she did something more: She made “free” the emotional centerpiece of the song. Decades later, when people think back to what was so viscerally moving about Houston’s rendition of the anthem, they invariably land on that word, on how she stretched and nourished it over multiple counts.

In putting an often-imitated-but-never-duplicated flourish on “free,” the singer injected new life into a concept that’s always been kept just beyond Black Americans’ reach.

“By making the idea of freedom the emotional and structural high point (not just the high note) of the anthem, Houston unlocked that iron door for Black people and helped make the song a part of our cultural patrimony, too,” the writer Cinque Henderson argued in 2016, nodding to Black Americans’ conflicting feelings toward the song (it’s for good reason that “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is widely considered to be the Black national anthem).

“It was…

Read the full article at rss.cnn.com

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Revisiting Whitney Houston's radical reclamation of 'The Star-Spangled Banner'

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