When Whitney Houston divebombs into the second syllable of “gleaming,” pause the tape.

The 27-year-old superstar is exactly 20 seconds into “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Super Bowl XXV, her skin already dewy from Tampa humidity and, ostensibly, the extraordinary circumstances. She is only the second Black woman to sing the song at our country’s biggest sports spectacle, less than a decade after Diana Ross fully indoctrinated the modern era of celebrity-spangled national anthems in 1982.

What’s more, 10 days earlier, in January 1991, the United States had launched Operation Desert Storm, dropping munitions on Iraq with the stated aim of freeing Kuwait. For more than a century, “The Star-Spangled Banner” had been used as a wartime rallying cry, a way to boost patriotism as the United States entered this war or that one. The military action was so significant that New Kids on the Block’s halftime show didn’t actually air during halftime. Instead, Peter Jennings told a captive television audience about the hail of American bombs falling on Iraq; ABC only broadcast New Kids after the New York Giants eked out their second Super Bowl victory.

As the camera panned across a series of state flags arranged across the field in alphabetical order while Houston finished her first lines, a suspicious but telling symbol fluttered in the January breeze: the battle flag of the Confederacy. Early in 1956, less than two years after the country’s Supreme Court declared that school segregation was unconstitutional, Georgia—a state so completely razed during the Civil War that its continued existence became fodder for Lost Cause zealots—decided that its previous flag’s homage to the Confederacy was suddenly too subtle on the question of secession. The new banner, one Georgia representative insisted, will declare “what we stood for, will stand for”: that is, state-sustained American racism.

About 80 seconds later, Houston hits the back half of “brave” and jabs her right arm in the air before quickly following with her left. That split second feels like a fleeting homage to the closed fist of Black power, like the one Olympic sprinter Tommie Smith had hoisted from the Olympic podium a quarter century earlier. More than 125 years had passed since Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, and it would take 17 more years for the United States to elect its first Black president. Intentional or not, Houston’s rapturous take on the anthem—a beautiful arc of patience, precision, and payoff—seemed stuck somewhere nearer the middle of history, sandwiched between the push for progress and those committed to regional revanche.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” has always been a protest song. I mean this historically and literally: In September 1814, Francis Scott Key watched from a ship held under British control as the redcoats tried to penetrate the defenses of Baltimore Harbor and take the city. Key had been keeping his eye to the sky, hopeful that the 30-foot-by-42-foot American flag flying over the mission-critical Fort McHenry would still be waving in the morning. When it was, he spent the next three days aboard the ship writing “Defence of Fort McHenry,” a four-verse celebration of the triumph that he set to the melody of a British drinking standard. Sure, Key scorned the British in his song, but the United States was so inchoate that this War of 1812 was more tellingly called the Second War of Independence. His protest was a plea for national unity at a moment when that concept remained too nebulous even to be called fragile.

More than a century passed before the song became the official national anthem of the United States; Herbert Hoover signed a bill so simple in 1931 that it seemed like a foregone conclusion. And, in most ways, it was: Alongside its galvanizing use in The Civil War and World War I, “The Star-Spangled Banner” had become both a battleground for American political factions and a mirror of its national failings, aspirations, and quandaries. Its lyrics had been rewritten to advocate for women’s suffrage, to rail against slavery, to proselytize for peace, and to encourage worker solidarity, all before 1931. Because so many Americans knew the melody and Key’s words, its musical and lyrical form became a convenient conduit for other arguments about domestic life and policy, about the shape the country should take. “The Star-Spangled Banner” mutated to fit circumstances, like a piece of the oral tradition amplified by a young country’s rapid growth and its plethora of newspapers. Despite how inert the anthem can feel nearly a century after it became the thing we are all obligated to hear all the time, it remains an endlessly adaptable song that can be used to say anything about the country we want ours to become.

The ambiguity and complexity of the national anthem flow directly from the man who wrote it. Key was a 35-year-old Georgetown lawyer and father who also loved writing verse when a U.S. general dispatched him to a British ship to plead for the release of a 65-year-old physician who had been taken prisoner during the War of 1812. Key opposed that war; still, he’d served two brief stints in the local militia after being motivated by an attack on the country his family emigrated to in 1720, before it was even a country.

The contradiction seemed typical for Key. Nearly a decade earlier, he had filed his first legal petition for the release of an enslaved person, a specialty of his legal career that eventually led him to argue in front of the Supreme Court. “No single lawyer is affiliated with more freedom petitions in the District of Columbia than Key,” writes musicologist Mark Clague in his smart and dogged history of the anthem, O Say Can You Hear? Key advocated for so many enslaved people that he himself was met with racist nicknames. Yet Key not only owned people but decried outright abolition as a plan bound to fail. He cofounded an organization that relocated Black Americans to Africa. Key was a white supremacist with, at best, a benevolent savior streak.

This hypocrisy famously radiates from his violent third verse, where Key squares up to the enemies who swore that the United States couldn’t withstand this assault and celebrates how their spilled blood has washed away their “foul footsteps’ pollution.” He then lambastes “the hireling and slave,” on the run from American vengeance and bound to die anyway. Key never said much about his signature song, so historians have been left to argue about his language: Was this a vindictive reference to enslaved Black people who fought for the Brits in the Corps of Colonial Marines, or to British fighters themselves (“professional soldiers and vassals of King George III,” as Clague writes), especially a particular general killed in the Baltimore bombardment? We may never definitively know, but Key opted to mention slaves in his ode “to the Land of the Free,” executing a four-line end rhyme that will forever complicate the way his words feel, no matter the facts.

The third verse is, of course, not even part of the United States’ national anthem, despite how much scrutiny it has received. Decades before Hoover signed that bill, teachers had begun asking for a standardized version of the song that their students might sing. Preempting explicit-lyrics warnings by 80 years, the National Education Association dropped the third verse in 1912; this bowdlerized text soon led to the “Service Version,” the sheet music that established the sound you imagine when you now think of “The Star-Spangled Banner” performed in an official American capacity, especially at military functions.

This codified rendition is a strange seesaw of a song, its constant toggle between quick rests and rising harmonies producing the seasick sensation of moving without actually going anywhere, of bobbing up and down in place. The song is strophic, so that all the verses adhere to the same music. It is a minor blessing, then, that the second, fourth, and (of course) third verses are so rarely performed in public; five minutes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” start to feel like being locked in some cheap state fair’s funhouse.

Dropping the third verse also codified something that was, is, and always should be crucial to “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a national anthem, perhaps its greatest strength: It is flexible. Not long after it was written, a Texas teacher translated it into German, his native tongue. The move became a boon for hundreds of thousands of German-Americans in the Union Army during the Civil War, where the song began to emerge as the de facto national anthem. People rewrote it to decry the Confederacy, to celebrate some dead hero. It was not static.

To wit, Clague has compiled nearly 600 variations on “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a number that continues to grow. Some have become political tools, used to advocate for the rights of those sometimes denigrated as outside of the American experience. There’s an Ojibwe version older than the Emancipation Proclamation that chronicles indigenous battles with alien invaders called Americans; a star-studded Spanish-language version, “Nuestro Himno,” arrived in April 2006, as immigration reemerged as an extreme flashpoint. There is Pitbull, shouting “Ya! Es tiempo de romper las cadenas” toward the end, telling everyone within earshot to break their chains, to fight. George W. Bush used this moment to suggest people learn English, not to reiterate the idea of American inclusivity.

By dint of the melody that Key borrowed, “The Star-Spangled Banner” has always been an exclusionary song. Written just before the colonies went to war for independence, “The Anacreontic Song” was the anthem for a London social club that specialized in music, named for a Greek lyricist who excelled in songs about sex and booze. With six long verses and a melodic structure that used very high notes to emphasize dramatic moments, it wasn’t intended for the entire group to sing. It was meant for a talented soloist, someone who could persevere wow. “It was composed to enable the exceptional singer to impress,” writes Clague.

Though throngs of Americans have always trudged their way through “The Star-Spangled Banner” en masse, it is, perhaps now more than ever, a showpiece for our stars. The most anodyne versions are those where such a star sings this famously difficult song “correctly” without saying anything else, when they see it as an obligation of success rather than an invitation for art. When she was 18, Taylor Swift rendered it as though she’d never read a history book, simply standing and delivering the lines with a sparkly guitar like some memorized homework assignment. (Swift once said she used opportunities to sing the anthem as a chance to get in front of a “large group of people.” The 2008 rendition, to date, is her last.) Charlie Puth made it sound this year like the theme song for some Disneyland amusement park where only good things ever happen. When the best thing you can say about any version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” is that it was fine, that is, to me, a failure by forfeiture.

The most compelling versions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” have long been the additive ones, those that use its flexibility to take the true patriotic risk of saying something new about the experience of being an American. As the Vietnam War peaked in 1968, José Feliciano—born blind in Puerto Rico before moving to Spanish Harlem—turned it into a bittersweet acoustic lament that drew ire but sounded insistent and honest. A year later, on Monday morning at Woodstock, the veteran-turned-radical Jimi Hendrix offered it as a summary of American discord, resistance, and resolve; playing through sheets of sheer noise and bending the theme until it nearly broke, Hendrix provided a national indictment that, in the end, crackled with hope.

After an 11-year-old Texas boy named Sebastian De La Cruz sparked a racist outcry when he performed the anthem in a charro suit during the NBA Finals in 2013, the team invited him back two days later. Sporting an even flashier getup, he hit the calamitous high point like he’d launched and landed a career-defining, half-court buzzer beater. And in July 2020, when the NBA resumed its Covid-interrupted season amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, Jon Batiste interlaced “The Star-Spangled Banner” with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the Black National Anthem. It was a reminder of the hollow promise at the core of Key and his anthem, of the endless quest to fill in that blank space with actual freedom and equality.

In the last several weeks, I have watched and listened to so many versions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that my YouTube algorithm is certainly on the brink of feeding me far-right backwash forevermore. I’ve seen men’s choirs perform “The Anacreontic Song,” which gave Key his melody back in 1814; 8-bit versions where fireworks explode over flags where the stars are only plus signs; assorted and terrible AI-driven EDM remixes that felt like pure hits of intravenous jingoism, as though all of this song’s very thorny and compelling and telling history had simply been reduced into some thick good-vibes-only syrup. As the United States reaches its 250th anniversary, its founding ideals—espoused by Key when he wrote of the brave and free—seem to so many of us like Sisyphean standards, goals that we will never reach despite our exertion. Simply belting out or bouncing along to “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 2026 is an act of reflexive patriotism, then, a flag decal slapped on the back of an F-350. If you like 100 iterations of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” my feed tells me, you will love this Greg Gutfeld supercut.

For me, though, there is an affirming version, a best version, a version that makes me feel like the song and the country can just maybe live up to the very high bars they set for themselves but have never cleared. By November 2016, Aretha Franklin had performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” for at least a dozen major events, including Super Bowls, Ivy League graduations, and Obama’s first Fourth of July as president. She’d suffered through racist backlash to her version at the cursed 1968 Democratic National Convention, when she was only 26 and just emerging as The Queen of Soul, to become one of the song’s most interesting conduits. Almost every version she sang was fluid and new.

In a fur coat and a Detroit Lions stocking cap, Franklin, a 74-year-old daughter of the South and the Great Migration, sits at a shiny black Yamaha piano straddling the 50-yard line for the Thanksgiving Day game between the Lions and the Minnesota Vikings. The country had elected Donald Trump president 16 days earlier. The Lions and Vikings are middle-of-the-pack teams, both pushing for playoff spots, so they are anxious to get going. Players bounce on the balls of their feet and nod their heads like they’re still listening to pump-up jams.

Franklin does not care about time, because she has something to say. On the longest version of the anthem ever broadcast, Franklin works through the familiar words like she’s trying to find their meaning for the very first time, improvising alongside the organist Richard Gibbs, who hawk-eyes her for the changes. Her voice dips, dives, cracks. She shifts “perilous fight” to “perilous flight.” And when she finally reaches Key’s lyrics about seeing the flag by the light of the bombs, she repeatedly shouts the line, like she’s just as surprised as Key was so long ago.

At the Super Bowl, the anthem averages less than two minutes; Franklin is nearly three minutes into it when she reaches those lines, when the crowd finally begins to connect and roar back a response. When she arrives near the end, she comes again and again to “home of the brave,” pounding the keys as she lets out gospel paroxysms before heading back for the phrase. It feels like a mass call-to-arms, a command for perseverance, the encouragement of someone who has seen enough to know that the best you can do is to lift every voice and sing. On the sidelines, Lions safety Miles Killebrew raises his closed right fist, pumps it, and then screams.

Franklin died less than two years later, and this was the final time she would perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” in public. It was musically free and brave, an end-to-end improvisation in front of a couchbound country at the precipice of crisis. It was politically free and brave, too, the final testimony of someone who knew enough to know what was still worth fighting for, no matter the bad news that would never fully disappear.