Marvin gaye singing the star spangled banner

We are free to tell the full truth, to hold power to account without fear or favor, and to follow facts wherever they lead. His own wintry pride displaced by . Again. He needed. Unbeknownst to those in attendance that night, all would eventually leave the game as winners after experiencing Gaye’s sensualized rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

Gaye’s musical performance takes Shana Redmond’s definition of black anthems as its centerpiece.

You come to LAist because you want independent reporting and trustworthy local information. Time. It is replaced by a thin-lipped smile of rage.

Orthodoxy. Mercy is spat like spinach between the teeth. / You know that.” Francis marks Gaye’s spectacular emergence into the archive of musical exceptionality that he embodied. That was the gun in his daddy’s hand. This, I believe, is why Houston and Gaye both extend the note on the word “free,” signaling that this is work not yet done but work that must be done.

Amiri Baraka writes that “it is impossible to say how old the blues is,” and this atemporality haunts black musical performance.

Because if freedom is “needful to man as air/usable as earth,” any refusal, national or cultural, is an investment in human erasure. / Trouble is always. “It soothes me to do so.” We are then offered an image of Gaye “spent in his father’s arms after a cruel night. You might miss it if you don’t listen to the song multiple times. But how could a man in the flowering of his life, so much abundance, let it go?

I don’t trust those who don’t like the smell. Stomping down the seed.

From “His father had no mercy,” the speaker vessels through Gaye’s personal familial conundrum as the center of gravity in a house of patriarchal refusal.