Only in America is the most influential songwriter a slave-owning trial lawyer with exactly one hit. Worse, Francis Scott Key stole the melody from a British pub hymn that had been lingering in the 19th-century equivalent of the public domain. The lyrics, all about him watching the Yankees and the Redcoats bomb the shit out of each other for a whole day in Baltimore, could have carried the 19th-century equivalent of a parental advisory, too.
It took a century and an act of Congress for the Star-Spangled Banner to become the American standard, which would seem proof of how catchy it isn’t. Without school drills or Whitney Houston or the constant drumbeat of patriotism, likely, the Banner reverts to scribbles on a page decades ago. It got Peter Nicks thinking: “If you could imagine an anthem for today, what would that be and how would you do it?” That’s the hand-on-heart question at the center of Anthem, a Hulu documentary from Nicks on the journey to make a fight song that reflects the country’s tortured soul.
Nicks, the pensive director behind a trilogy of docs exploring institutions in his Oakland home town, enlists the help of two expert ears: the jazz pianist Kris Bowers, who composed the scores for Bridgerton, Green Book and other screen gems; and DJ Dahi, the hip-hop producer behind Kendrick Lamar, Big Sean and more chart toppers.
In fact, Ryan Coogler, an executive producer on this film, was reminded of the sheer glut of pop anthems that speak to the American experience while premiering this 97-minute thought exercise at the Tribeca film festival. “It’s a trip how many songs just New York has,” the Black Panther director tells the Guardian over a Zoom call with his collaborators earlier this week. “We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, and they had these like 360-degree photo booths. And they weren’t just playing the same song; they were playing the same 30-second loop of Empire State of Mind.”
“But the thing too, Ryan, is it was the same weekend as Puerto Rican independence,” says Dahi, noting the reggaeton beats echoing around the city as well.
“In America, people don’t fully realize that there were a whole bunch of songs that were being considered as the national anthem,” adds Nicks. “Hail Columbia. My Country ’Tis of Thee. This Land Is Your Land. There’s something about the American character, the American personality that seems to want to say that there can only be one song.”
Rather than dream up a new version of Key’s jingle from the cosseted isolation of an LA studio, Bowers and Dahi climbed into a drop-top Mustang and set off on a six-city listening tour – zigzagging from the midwest to the deep south and back to the Bay Area. When you aren’t fearing for the safety of these two Black men on the open road, you’re marveling at how eagerly these mega artists take to being music theory students while steeping themselves in the distinct sonic flavors of each region they pass through. At first the task of alloying jazz, country and Native songscapes to America’s other disparate sounds seems as impossible as consolidating 50 states under one flag. But it wasn’t long before Dahi’s bass instincts took over. Sampling, his stock and trade, is all about “taking any genre and bringing it into our world”, he says. “I knew that if we could find one thing in each song, we could relate it to other parts.”
Each jam session on the road was an occasion for local performers to lecture on music history and wax on about their art form’s particular knack for making transcendent connections. During one stop at a juke joint in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a white female keyboard player looks like she might strike a sour note with the Black members of her quartet while recalling her past affection for the old state banner – which, you’ll recall, had a whole Confederate flag inside. But after sounding out other Black friends, she developed a newfound appreciation for that symbol’s underlying menace. “Now,” she says in the film, “if I see it I think, Oh God. I make assumptions about what kind of person must live in that house to fly that flag.”
But not all of Anthem’s discordant beats are so easily harmonized. At the end of their tour, Bowers and Dahi convene a writers room to help the songwriting process along – only for sparks to fly between a Nashville country music queen and a Cali “femmeton”. The latter, a Chicana social justice warrior, feels the new song should be honest about America’s broken promises to Latin immigrants and Indigenous people. The former, a blond ex-contestant on The Voice, doesn’t think an anthem should betray its country with constructive criticism. Ultimately, the stalemate is broken by the estimable poet laureate Joy Harjo, who amplifies the argument for solution-oriented lyrics while making a pitch for sprinkling some Indigenous spoken word on to the bridge.
Tense moments are par for the course when reappraising something as sacrosanct as the Banner. José Feliciano and Jimi Hendrix kicked off the controversy in the 60s with their singular interpretations of the anthem. But of course everybody slathers their special sauce on it now. Even the renditions that were once considered so offensive – looking at you, Carl Lewis – have taken on a certain charm in hindsight. “The scholars in our film talk about why those were the versions that captured America so much,” says Nicks, “the versions where people of color take the song and make it their own.” The film also nods at the pushback against pairing Key’s opus with James Weldon Johnson’s Lift Every Voice and Sing (AKA the Black national anthem), a hornet’s nest that kicked up again when Abbott Elementary’s Sheryl Lee Ralph performed that song at this year’s Super Bowl.
When I ask Coogler if his famously exhaustive reference bible for the Black Panther franchise included an anthem for Wakanda, a cautious smile creases his face. “Um … I’m not gonna answer that,” he says, leaving the Zoom room in titters.
Instead, he shares a story about an experience with his uncle, a longshoreman who was a treasurer in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and “very politically active”. Coogler remembers his uncle facilitating an exchange program and playing host to a group of student activists from South Africa. “I had dinner with them, marched with them, not knowing I was going to make a film with a good chunk of dialog in Xhosa, one of the languages of South Africa,” he says.
“I remember at one point them saying, ‘We’re gonna share some of our national songs with y’all,” and they did, like, 13 and knew ’em all by heart. Some of the songs had dances. Then it was like, ‘Your turn now.’ We had maybe one song? Lift Every Voice? I remember struggling for some of the words and feeling really embarrassed, you know?”
The anthem Bowers and Dahi ultimately arrive at, We Are America, hits all the right notes; it’s wistful, hopeful – you can just picture a ballpark crowd standing at attention and singing along. Nicks drops the curtain on Anthem with a studio arranged performance featuring everyone who contributed to the piece. And though it winds up resonating with exactly the sort of We Are the World treacliness that Bowers and Dahi had hoped to avoid, an earworm is an earworm – and this one will stay bored in your brain well after the closing credits roll.
At any rate, it’s just one interpretation. Wait until HER or Camila Cabello get hold of this sheet music. They’re exactly the young artists the film-makers believe will drive the biggest changes to the national anthem. “They’re gonna paint it differently, flip it, use a different brush,” says Dahi.
Of course there will inevitably be those who see two Black men supplanting the work of an ex-slave owner and cite them for erasure or worse: an un-American act. But the anthem Bowers and Dahi offer up isn’t meant to replace the Star-Spangled Banner. All they’re doing is putting music to an imperfect union based on one perfect idea and showing the folly of boiling that 246-year history into a single-stanza song. Worst case, you’ll come away thinking it might be time for our fractured country to consider a national mixtape.
“Our song is more of an inspiration to remind people of the power of their voice as it relates to our personal stories,” says Nicks, a 55-year-old descendant of sharecroppers. “That proximity to our not-so-distant history is powerful. And an anthem is all about telling that story.”