The Lasting Power Of Whitney Houston's National Anthem

It's Been a Minute

NPR

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, Religion & Spirituality, Spirituality

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why does Whitney Houston's 1991 Super Bowl national anthem still resonate 30 years later? Sam chats with author and Black Girl Songbook host Danyel Smith about that moment of Black history and what it says about race, patriotism and pop culture.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What was a national mood then?
0:01.8	I mean to be honest, the national mood was...
0:05.6	everybody was kind of shook.
0:07.6	That is Danielle Smith, and she's talking about the national mood
0:11.6	and the run-up to the Super Bowl.
0:13.6	Not this weekend Super Bowl, but another one.
0:16.6	Also in Tampa, 30 years ago.
0:19.6	In January 1991.
0:23.0	It was a different time. I mean, besides the fact that there was no
0:26.0	social media yet or anything like that,
0:28.7	there hadn't been these huge terrorist events like
0:32.0	the Twin Towers going down in Manhattan,
0:35.0	the Boston Marathon, those kind of things hadn't happened yet.
0:38.4	We didn't really have a lot of familiarity with walking through
0:43.6	metal detectors and things like that to go into ball games of any kind.
0:47.6	America had just entered the first Gulf War 10 days before.
0:51.4	People were scared.
0:53.0	And the game, Super Bowl 25,
0:55.5	it became this visual symbol of America's emerging modern security state.
1:00.4	There was a lot of thought at that time that the Super Bowl was a soft target.
1:03.8	Oh wow.
1:04.4	Because you know, there would be so many people there and
	...

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