“Oh say can you see…by the dawn’s…*30% of the crowd starts to mumble the rest of the lyrics that they only know three-quarters of*”
~The National Anthem of the United States
The Star-Spangled Banner is, as the kids say, a jam. Our national anthem since 1931, it’s pretty much the one song that you can get punched in the face for disparaging other than Drunk in Love in this country.
But if you really take a step back and look at it objectively, for a song that we hold such deep reverence for, it’s pretty surprising that it’s even a song we know in the first place. We literally took a popular British drinking song that we’d been changing the lyrics to, parody style, for years (basically an Olde-Timey version of “Call You Maybe”) and stuck in a poem about a time a bunch of British people attacked a fort during the War of 1812, and were like, yeah this seems patriotic, let’s turn it into our National Anthem in like, 120 years.
But it works! And that’s the thing with National Anthems, so long as they swell and you can get a good low angle shot of an Olympic Athlete’s eyes getting a bit misty hearing it, no one really reads that much into what they say.
Who among you actually knows what a rampart is? Like, who can describe a rampart without having to use Wikipedia, right now? Okay, sure, you just got it, but not all of us aced our SAT Verbal Exams, asshole.
Anyway, this all made us think about National Anthems. Because just about every country has them, and not every country has ever had cause to write a poem about fighting the British in a battle. Most countries, sure. But not all. And so we dug through English translations of every single National Anthem out there, and, well, there’s so much we want to share.
So welcome to our National Anthem series. We’ll spend the next few weeks going through the most depressing National Anthems, as well as the National Anthems that convey the lowest self-esteem. But first, we want to get the fun ones out of the way. Because guess what? A lot of National Anthems are metal as fuck. So let’s start there.
The National Anthems Of The World Series: Part 1- The Most Metal National Anthem Lyrics
We’re still only like 40% sure what a rampart is, though.
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America Fun Fact of the Day 