I'm guessing he made them play it over and over again - rehearsing each phrase of the music in excruciating detail.
It took me fifteen minutes just to rehearse the first three notes. If you shout, "Nope, do it again!" at any one of my kids from that nightmare, they will break out in a cold sweat.
Heh, Maya Rudolph is great. The funny thing is, she has the chops to probably pull off a decent anthem herself. Her mom was singer Minnie Riperton (see below), her dad was a composer and music producer, and her godmother was singer Teena Marie, so she has quite the musical background. [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE0pwJ5PMDg[/yt]
Heh. I think I've been through a couple of rehearsals like that. For me personally, it usually resulted in a long nap since the problem was usually in the woodwinds.
I made one when I was younger that was deliberately bad. I called it "The Star Strangled Badger". It wasn't even the right tune I'm not sure what tune it was now. I have it somewhere. I'll have to see if I can find it.
Why can I picture is you as like Lex Luthor just hovering over a student listening to them singing and then they slip up a tiny bit and you just go "WRONG!!!!"
Thanks, but it's more like Alan Rickman's Severus Snape or Benedict Cumberbach's Sherlock Holmes. "Wrong!" Indeed. "No. Do it again."
I didn't like it at all. The vocal gymnastics were over the top. It's not a rock or pop song; it's the National Anthem.
I finally got around to watching this one. Holy crap, #7 is Cab Calloway! I would like to say in light of all these lousy performances that my city tends to get it right. I'm part of a community band that gets called to all sorts of public events, but we rarely get to play the National Anthem. Normally I'd be put out by being preempted for a soloist, but I will always yield the stage to the people we usually get to perform. I'd say 95% of the time the person singing (or rather, leading) the National Anthem at our events is a person serving in the military. And not a single one of those has sung it any other way except the way it's supposed to be performed.
Well, she was a big star at the time, and maybe she had a reputation for being able to sing a little bit. What probably happened is she ambushed the Padres PR people. She never intended to sing it straight. It wasn't that she was trying to sing and couldn't, she wasn't even trying. She deliberately mangling the song, trying to play it for laughs. Obviously, it backfired on her.