Marvin gaye singing the star spangled banner

His soulful plea during his NBA All-Star Game performance will follow him beyond death, and into the reservoir of meaning highlighted by his profound absence. Marvin Gaye soulfully singing our National Anthem - The Stars Spangled Banner at the NBA Annual Allstars Game inat the Forum in Inglewood, Ca.

The Most Mournful Rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” Ever Performed Marvin Gaye’s performance of the national anthem transforms the song into a soulful elegy, a bittersweet reflection on freedom and its possibilities. 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.

Marvin Gaye will die, murdered by his father a little over a year after his performance of the national anthem. Mercy is spat like spinach between the teeth. 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.

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. It is unlike almost any other rendition then or since.

Dark blue suit and sunglasses — reflective — Gaye is accompanied by a drum beat and keyboard. Paranoia does that. And with mercy goes empathy. It is replaced by a thin-lipped smile of rage. What did he sense in the moment, in the moments that followed, about redemption?

Stalked by demons and by death, the soft voice meeting the softer face collides into a temporal abyss that failed to measure the possibility of his brilliance without also claiming the right to subsume him entirely. What does he think he is doing?

Those without it lose it by adulthood. It slips out in a pee stream. What did Gaye know, when he sauntered, casually, to the stadium floor in his suit and aviator sunglasses, about what was to come? Marvin Gaye singing the Star-Spangled Banner in For him?

How can there be an elegy without clearly discernible loss? For us? And it has a referent. His father had no mercy. Race, sonic registers, and nationalism converge in this performance. 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.

Francis writes :. Take Marvin Gaye. What did he carry on that day that we could and could not see?