Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals just finished and the Boston Bruins got the win 4-0. My team was eliminated a couple rounds ago and I lost interest and skipped pretty much the entirety of the third round. I did watch all the games of the finals though. I started game 1 wanting to cheer for the Vancouver Canucks because apparently good Canadians should cheer for a team based in Canada. I quickly found I couldn't cheer for them because I don't respect the way their top players play. Dives and bites galore. Bah. So I started rooting for the Bruins and they managed to pull it off. Good work!
I watch a fair number of televised sporting events and they tend to start with the singing of the national anthems for the countries involved. I'm generalizing here but it generally seems like singers can put their own spin on The Star Spangled Banner in terms of tempo and enunciation and such but Oh Canada is the same every time. I don't much care about how people treat the US anthem since I'm not American but I do get upset when someone 'butchers' my anthem.
Now, the Canucks have an opera singer who sings the anthems and he puts a twist on Oh Canada that I actually like. He just stops singing in the middle and leaves it to the crowd to keep it going. The first time he did it had to be pretty ballsy but it seems to be something of a tradition now.
There is a huge difference between our two anthems. O Canada! is a song that the masses can sing. The Star Spangled Banner covers a pretty wide range of notes and is a very tough song to sing. I think a lot of the time when people butcher the American anthem it's pretty much because they are covering the fact that if they tried to sing it simply they'd just fall flat on "The rockets' red blare."
ReplyDelete