In what is arguably one of the greatest renditions of the national anthem performed before a live audience, Whitney Houston emerges on-screen and offers the Super Bowl crowd in Tampa, Florida, her distinctive voice for just under three minutes. Race, sonic registers, and nationalism converge in this performance. It is unlike almost any other rendition then or since. And it has a referent. Dark blue suit and sunglasses β reflective β Gaye is accompanied by a drum beat and keyboard. What does he think he is doing?
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all, when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole, reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians: this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, this man, superb in love and logic, this man shall be remembered.
It says the country traffics in images of inclusion that will never be fully incorporated, never real, and that this is the great irony of the United States. Its rhetoric of freedom is embedded in the reality of unfreedom.
What did Gaye know, when he sauntered, casually, to the stadium floor in his suit and aviator sunglasses, about what was to come?
For him? For us? What did he sense in the moment, in the moments that followed, about redemption? What did he carry on that day that we could and could not see? How can there be an elegy without clearly discernible loss? To take the national anthem and loosen its war tones, replacing them with the singular voice of collective ecstasy, and all the while deceptively presenting the song as an upbeat groove meant to signal the collective vibration of those in need responding to the call that will get them home.
