Blood, gore, melody

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 14:54:00 +0000

When NBC lets us see victorious athletes from other countries, the Olympics medal ceremonies are one of the rare times -- state visits, international athletic contests and a visit from the Toronto Blue Jays excepted -- that we get to consider the national anthems of other nations.

Chances are you even have your favorites: "O Canada," maybe, or "La Marseillaise." But how much time have you spent thinking about them?

Sure, for "La Marseillaise," you think of the stirring scene in "Casablanca" in which the patrons of Rick's Cafe Americain rise up to drown out the hated Germans' singing. But those lyrics -- do you know they are singing, amid other sanguine images, about letting impure blood water the fields' furrows? (Fortunately, the stanza about sons and women having their throats slit is no longer sung.)

The song emerged from the bloody French Revolution, so the lyrics make some sense in context. Or, as the Massachusetts musician and educator Nat Needle observes, "I would guess you'd have to be invaded and occupied a lot (and doing your share of invading and occupying) to come up with stuff like that and have it be appealing to people."

Salon.com > Summer Games

Blood, gore, melody