The Lasting Power Of Whitney Houston's National Anthem

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2021

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Why does Whitney Houston's 1991 Super Bowl national anthem still resonate 30 years later? Listen to this episode from our friends at It's Been A Minute with Sam Sanders where they chat 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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, it's from team here. I hope you're enjoying your Super Bowl Sunday, aka America's National Holiday,
0:08.0	aka the day where I get to dip my pizza into ketchup and no one looks at me weird because everyone's just eating way too many calories anyway.
0:15.7	Anyway, we're bringing you a special Super Bowl episode about Whitney Houston's national anthem performance
0:23.5	30 years ago at the Super Bowl in 1991.
0:26.6	And one of the reasons why the performance was so special other than Whitney Houston's amazing voice
0:32.3	was that it was taking place during a time that was also politically fraught. It was the early days of the first golf war.
0:39.9	So this episode comes from our friends that it's been a minute. It's a beautiful interview about race, pop culture and patriotism, all surrounding the Super Bowl.
0:48.8	Here it is. We hope you enjoy this episode and we hope you enjoy the game. Go Chiefs.
0:56.8	What was a national mood then? I mean to be honest, the national mood was everybody was kind of shook.
1:04.7	That is Danielle Smith and she's talking about the national mood and the run up to the Super Bowl.
1:10.7	Not this weekend Super Bowl, but another one. Also in Tampa,
1:14.4	30 years ago in January 1991.
1:20.0	It was a different time. I mean besides the fact that there was no social media yet or anything like that,
1:25.7	there hadn't been these huge terrorist events like the Twin Towers going down in Manhattan, the Boston Marathon.
1:32.9	Those kind of things hadn't happened yet. We didn't really have a lot of
1:36.7	familiarity with walking through metal detectors and things like that to go into ball games of any kind.
1:44.6	America had just entered the first goal for 10 days before. People were scared.
1:49.9	And the game, Super Bowl 25, it became this visual symbol of America's emerging modern security state.
1:57.4	There was a lot of thought at that time that the Super Bowl was a soft target.
2:00.6	Oh wow.
2:01.4	Because you know there would be so many people there and I believe at that time there were 1700 individual
2:07.1	security personnel on site. I was one of the first times they put up barricades around a stadium.
	...

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