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NUESTRO PARANOIA
BY PETER KURTH (published 05.03.06)
“The Latino-oriented record label Urban Box Office (UBO) said
Friday it would put the new Spanish version of `The Star-Spangled
Banner’ on the market Monday to coincide with the U. S. Senate's debate on immigration
legislation.” – Fox News
“The recording, dubbed `Nuestro Himno’ or `Our
Anthem,’ is set to `urban Latino rhythms’ but respects the
song's traditional structure, with a few windy cadences and a loose
translation about a `sacred flag.’” – Sacramento Bee
“I think people who want to be a citizen of this country
ought to learn English.” -- George W. Bush
Gentle reader: ¡Hola! ¿Que tal?
I’m afraid that’s
all the Spanish I know, if you don’t count isolated words -- mañana, tequila, Evita and so
on. About 20 years ago, I took two
months of Spanish lessons during a research trip to Madrid, but the only
phrases that stick in my head, for some reason, are “Where are the
skin creams, please?” and “I’m a stewardess for British
Airways.” Neither of them will
get me very far in the current raging debate over Nuestro Himno, the new, “Spanglishized” version of
“The Star-Spangled Banner” and evidently the greatest threat to
national security and American amour
propre since French fries and the Axis of Evil.
In case you missed it, Nuestro Himno is the brainchild of
British-born producer Adam Kidron, the head of Urban Box Office, who
recently pulled together a number of Latino pop stars –
Mexico’s Gloria Trevi, Puerto Rico’s Carlos Ponce, Cuban rapper
Pitbull, etc. – to record a Spanish version of the national anthem as
“a statement of solidarity with the immigrant movement,” and to
coincide with what were expected to be further massive protests for
immigrants’ rights on Monday, May 1.
By the time you read this, we’ll know if the nation has
survived the indignity or not.
"I said, what's a song
we could record that everyone could rally around?" Kidron declared
last week in an interview with The
Miami Herald. “Me and everyone I know are living the American
dream” – even the English need to learn English, it seems
– “and, to an extent, we do it on the backs of American
immigrants. I wanted to make the
most beautiful version of the national anthem ever so it reflected the
brilliance of these Latino artists.”
If there’s a whiff of commercial exploitation in Kidron’s
remarks, that, too, is American as apple pie.
“Look at how many
Americans parade their Irish roots on St Patrick’s Day,” Kidron
explains. “And go down to
Little Italy in New York. When you hear people speaking Italian in
those restaurants, you think, oh good, it’s authentic, the food must
be good. Yet it seems to be a
qualification for Hispanic immigrants that they mustn’t … sing
in their own language.”
Granted, Nuestro Himno takes some rather large liberties with “The
Star-Spangled Banner,” warbling on not just about the “sacred
flag,” “fierce combat” and “gleaming emblems of
victory,” but “equality,” “brotherhood” and
the need for immigrant workers to “break [their] chains.” Overseas, May 1 is International
Workers’ Day, and it’s this, combined with good old American
racism and paranoia, that has the nation’s “conservative”
punditry in such a froth.
Take Michelle Malkin, for
example, the syndicated columnist and TV talking head. Malkin is a sort of … well, a dark version of Ann Coulter, who
thinks Nuestro Himno is a sign
that Mexico
intends to “reconquer” the United
States.
I’m not aware that Mexico
ever did conquer the United States
– I thought it was the other way around – but Malkin’s
words are part of a well-orchestrated right-wing piece, and they dribble to
insignificance next to other commentary I’ve read.
“Just in time for their
May Day celebrations,” says an editorial in The American Daily, “the hoards [sic] of illegal immigrants invading the U.
S. have released a version of `The
Star-Spangled Banner’ in Spanish.
[It] clearly shows what [they] want:
they want amnesty and they want communism.” The
American Daily is published out of Phoenix,
Arizona, where they don’t know
the difference between “hoard” and “horde” and whose
citizens can’t build fences quickly enough against the
“Messican” menace. Even
Charles Key, great-great-grandson of “The Star-Spangled
Banner’s” original author, Francis Scott Key, has got in on the
act, finding it “despicable that someone is going into our society
from another country and … changing the national anthem.” (If Key still got royalties on his
ancestor’s words, I doubt he’d be so incensed.)
What nobody’s saying in
this trumped-up farce is that Nuestro
Himno isn’t being forced on anyone. No one’s asking that it be made
“official,” for Spanish-speakers or anyone else. Singing Nuestro Himno is and will be entirely voluntary – if it
can be sung at all, that is, which “The Star-Spangled Banner”
notoriously can’t. Even
professionals forget the words and start begging for mercy when confronted
with this octave-swooping thing, which is why the anthem is now routinely
lip-synched at baseball games – that and the memory of Roseanne Barr,
whose raucous, crotch-grabbing rendition of the tune nearly led to riots in
1990. In It All Started With Columbus (1961), humorist Richard Armour
explained how we got stuck with Key’s musical nightmare to begin
with.
"In an attempt to take Baltimore,”
Armour wrote, “the British attacked Fort
McHenry, which protected the
harbor…. During the bombardment, a young lawyer named Francis `Off’
Key wrote `The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and when, by the dawn's early
light, the British heard it sung, they fled in terror!"
So take heart, America
-- no hay nada temer! If millions of illegal aliens start
singing Key’s song, they just might run shrieking back over the
border.
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