National Anthem expert
August 14, 2012 2 Comments
Bet you didn’t know that I’m also a national anthem expert, did you? Well, Kyrie O’Connor (of Wait Wait fame, for you fans) was writing a story on national anthems for Salon (be sure to click on “continue reading”) and came across an earlier post expressing my love for the Soviet/Russian anthem. Given that there probably aren’t a lot of genuine anthem experts out there, that was good enough for me to get an interview. I did assure her that I was not a genuine “expert” in the matter. Nonetheless, she loved my thoughts and anecdotes on the matter. (Plus, five minutes of research on wikipedia beforehand turned out to be quite useful, too). The result is that never before have I done a media interview that resulted in so much of what I had to say actually turning up in the article. Pretty cool:
Steven Greene, an associate professor of political science at North Carolina State University, is a bit of a national-anthem buff. “They’re a jingoistic vestige of a former era, but I love them anyway,” he says. So much so that when he goes to Carolina Hurricanes hockey games, he often picks games against Canadian teams so that he’ll get to sing along with “O Canada.”
His favorite is the stirring and stately Russian national anthem, which is a reworking of the old Soviet anthem. (Greene even remembers a bit of trivia from the ’92 Olympics, in which the newly minted former Soviet republics, lacking an official anthem, used the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth as their official song.)
About Steve Greene
When I was a child living in Finland I always loved the old Soviet anthem. I didn’t tell it to anybody because I didn’t want to be branded as a commie. Nowadays we still don’t like ruskies very much but I think that it is a bit more socially acceptable to tell someone that the Russian national anthem is as good as an anthem gets.
Same here on the Soviet anthem. When I first heard it as a teenager (during the Olympics, of course), it reminded me of the great Russian composers.