Christina Aguilera hit all the right notes during her pre-Super Bowl performance of the national anthem. But the right lyrics? Not so much.
Aguilera completely dissed both the ramparts and the fact that o'er them, we could see the broad stripes and bright stars gallantly streaming, by skipping that line entirely. Instead she sang: "What so proudly we watched at the twilight's last gleaming." That was a pseudo-repeat of the earlier lyric, "What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming." If you missed it, catch the moment via the video below.
To Aguilera's credit, she kept going. And the fact that she botched the lyrics verifies that she was genuinely singing live. But when you're hired to belt out "The Star Spangled Banner" at the biggest television event of the year, it's probably best to know the words.
Alexandra Petri gave her unique take on the slip-up by Aguilera:
After Christina Aguilera, who has confessedly been singing this since she was seven (and if you don't believe me, check YouTube), memorably flubbed the lyrics at this year's Super Bowl, it seems as good an occasion as any to point out what an utter miscalculation this song is. It is a botch of nature. It combines the tune of a drinking song -- "To Anacreon in Heaven" -- with some of the most bizarre and dated lyrics ever attached to any song in history. Force a crowd to sing this song, and it is the musical equivalent of a party you send to climb a mountain that loses a couple of guys in the first pass and a couple more in the next pass and finally comes straggling back to camp, irredeemably broken in spirit, having eaten Jeff.
Anyone who even casually glances at our national anthem cannot escape the conclusion that it is in no way, how shall I put this, singable?
If you just sort of strayed across this tune, you would assume that it required years of training to hit any of the notes with any degree of consistency. You would be right. Then you would look at the lyrics and think, "This seems oddly specific! What a bizarre relic from the War of 1812." You would be right again.
In the wake of the Christina Aguilera slip-up Celebritology asked readers whether they could forgive her the mistake, and shared the results:
Americans have spoken. And what they've said is this: Christina Aguilera, we cannot tolerate your assault on our national anthem.
In the poll that accompanied our previous post about Aguilera's Super Bowl version of the national anthem -- a rendition that does not involve ramparts but, in a flub we missed the first few times we watched, does include "the twilight's last reaming" -- a whopping 67 percent of you said that her Star-Spangled error is unforgivable.
So just to recap: in the past, as a culture, we've forgiven Hugh Grant for picking up a hooker, Robert Downey Jr. for abusing drugs and Kanye West for intentionally interrupting an awards show. But we're not willing, at least not yet, to forgive Aguilera for screwing up a couple of song lyrics.
