Perhaps she was too concerned with breaking Patti LaBelle’s record for turning single-syllable words into entire paragraphs during the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but noted ex-teen queen Christina Aguilera botched the national anthem something fierce before the Super Bowl. Aguilera started out all right, but she had a problem with the ramparts — specifically, the “O’er the ramparts we watched” line, which she left out altogether.
Aguilera tried to make up for it by combining two lines — “What so proudly we watched,” instead of “What so proudly we hailed”, but let’s just say that it was too late to reverse the error. Twitter blew up, and all Aguilera could do was to oversing every word from there on out, which she most certainly did.
It was a fitting tribute for a Super Bowl that has seen procedural errors all over the place, from the inability of the city of Dallas to deal with unusual weather to the last-minute news that 400 unlucky people would not get to sit in their paid-for seats.
Bonus goof-up points for the flyover at the end of the song — too bad nobody saw it, what with the roof closed at Cowboys Stadium and all.
Of course, Aguilera’s not the first person to goof up the National Anthem in front of a huge audience — we all remember what Roseanne Barr did to the poor song at a San Diego Padres game a few years back, and the considerably more talented Macy Gray messed it up at the 2001 Hall of Fame game in her hometown of Canton, Ohio, drawing boos from the crowd.
It’s a nervewracking situation, and flubbing a line is understandable. However, newly-minted Hall of Famer Deion Sanders of the NFL Network has already tweeted some damage control on Ms. Aguilera’s behalf. It’s about as feasible as the league’s take on all the other mini-disasters of the week
