It sounded like a good idea at the time, but...

[Rob]

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/listen-to-an-egyptian-army-band-hilariously-butcher-the-1771659234?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link

[Psycho Bass Guy]

Flea seems a good percussive, rhythmic player. He doesn't seem to be such a good melodic player.

...which is ultimate irony because the breakthrough album for the Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magic, saw Flea stop being a mindless thumb popper and play melodically very seriously. He's held to that pretty closely on all their following work (with diminishing returns, IMO.) He's gone on for years in the music press about how his start playing trumpet as child informed his concept of melody that he grew into as a bass player.

His choice of notes for harmonising and fleshing out the little licks and runs he improvises on this video are fairly banal if not entirely wrong. His terrible on/off wah, fuzz and blended clean signal tone is really appalling as well. To use that much equipment to produce that bloodless quacking tone in the high register is surprising. Perhaps they simply used a DI off of his pedalboard and the stadium heard something much more bombastic?

His tone was terrible, but that was the least of his musical offenses. If you're going to play that hokey anthem and NOT simply play it straight, then your "hook" had better be stellar because you'll have nowhere to hide musically. Attempting "The Star Spangled Banner" solo on a bass is ill-advised to begin with; playing it like that and screwing the pooch but refusing to acknowledge said bestiality is total hubris. I expected MUCH better. If someone like Les Claypool were to play the national anthem, it might not be universally admired but would at least be interesting, and prior to this I would have though the same about Flea.

Part of me says he messed up, and part of me thinks Americans take their national pride and national symbology scarily seriously for such an apparently free minded and independently spirited nation.

Bitching about national anthem performances is a past time unto itself. We as a country are well aware of just how BAD our national anthem truly is, but like our politics, we usually shoot (/occasionally praise) the messenger and don't change the message. ...and there probably IS a xenophobic nationalist segment of the population who would enjoy a something more akin to Amerika Über Alles, but they're not going to be watching Lakers basketball.

[Dave W]

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/listen-to-an-egyptian-army-band-hilariously-butcher-the-1771659234?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link

Ouch! 

In their defense, they were trying to do an accurate rendition, they were just bad at it.

Flea has no excuse.

[uwe]

" ... and there probably IS a xenophobic nationalist segment of the population who would enjoy a something more akin to Amerika Über Alles ..."

I know, the Nazi's projected it that way, but the lyric was actually written as a rallying cry for national unification, not world domination.  "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles ... " (btw, that verse and the one following are no longer sung, we now start with the third verse  "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit", which more agreeably means "unity, rule of law and freedom"). Deutschland was late on its feet for national unification because of continuous mini-states bickering of the individual German states, the Catholic/Protestant schism plus the watchful eyes of neighbor countries that were already united and had an appetite for more (Austria, France, Denmark/Sweden and Russia), Hoffmann von Fallersleben, the lyricist,



wanted to do away with the "Kleinstaaterei" (small fry states), he didn't have a series of Blitzkriege and subjugation of nearly all of Continental Europe in mind.