You Can Always Change What You're Channeling—Ingrid Andress and the GOP

Many called it the worst performance ever, but her 'Star Spangled Banner' was both timely and appropriate. It also channeled Jimi Hendrix.

Screenshot of Ingrid Andress at this year’s Home Run Derby by Jazprose

Ingrid Andress was met with more than a hangover the morning after she sang the national anthem at this year’s Home Run Derby. Rattled by a tsunami of negative criticism, she took to social media to tell the world that performance wasn’t really her. She was drunk that night and didn’t mean to make a mess of the anthem.

It’s too bad she didn’t step back from all the criticism — and step into the persona she created for her critically acclaimed and commercially successful debut album Lady Like. Had she done so, she might have realized that her discordant take on the national anthem was appropriate to the national moment.

After all, when the song “Lady Like” made it onto two Billboard Top 40 lists, Andress was hailed for creating an anthem of her own — one that thumbed its nose at gender stereotypes. She wasn’t old-fashioned ladylike, she sang. 

She was deliberately controversial, outspoken, and unnameable. She drank tequila straight, kissed on the first date, bit her nails, and didn’t even own a dress. I’m a lady like that, she sang.

But Andress didn’t claim that self after the public slammed her

She took cover. Had she waited just a little longer, after the proverbial hair of the dog kicked in, she might have realized that she’d done something significant.

Her rendition of the national anthem came within 48 hours of the Trump-rally shooting and on the first day of the Republican National Convention. A convention that has arrogantly jettisoned the party of Ronald Reagan, Mitt Romney, and George Bush as it wallows in the MAGA takeover of conservatism itself. What’s happened is the political equivalent of The Rape of the Sabine Women.

This new Republican convention served up a party drunk on the repressive goals of Project 2025. Drunk on its vision of an imperial presidency the Founding Fathers warned against. Drunk on an evangelical extremism Jesus himself would not recognize. Drunk on a story they believe because they want to believe it. Just like jihadists who believe martyrdom will be rewarded in the afterlife with 72 virgins.

This new MAGA-Republican Party — rooted in Trump’s “story” that the 2020 election was stolen — is as drunk in its way as Ingrid Andress claimed to be during this year’s Home Run Derby in Arlington, Texas.

---

We can laugh at Ingrid Andress if we want to

But we’d be laughing at ourselves. Because she sang the national anthem so badly — and in another sense so well — it became a portrait of our chaotic body politic and the disturbingly polarized moment in which the nation now founders.

Look at her face in the above photograph, and you will see that her song was also a cry for help. For herself, yes. But for the rest of us too, even though she didn’t seem to realize it.

What I saw while watching her performance was a young woman in crisis. She’s only 32, and if you didn’t know she was a four-time Grammy nominated singer, you’d have thought MLB had dragged her from a shelter for abused women or the unhoused.

Ingrid Andress was drunk. She has owned that. And it’s time to give her the space to sober up and get healthy again.

But I wish she had been the kind of “Lady Like”

she claimed to be in the same-titled LP before picking up her boots and disappearing into rehab for a while. Perhaps she was too concerned for her career — like Nikki Haley in Milwaukee — to notice that her rendition of the national anthem echoed another earlier performance. One that painted a picture of a similarly chaotic America.

Namely, the historic and iconic version of the “Star Spangled Banner” performed by Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock in August of 1969.

When Hendrix took the stage on that warm August day

America was in crisis. Only one week earlier, followers of Charles Manson murdered eight innocent people in their homes in California. The Woodstock music festival occurred one year after the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. And in many ways, the country was still reeling.

Richard Nixon was in the White House. The United States was dropping napalm, Agent Orange, and 10-thousand-pound bombs on the people of Vietnam. The Stonewall Uprising took place in June of that year in New York, followed by a four-day race riot in July. When Hendrix appeared onstage on the last day of Woodstock, he let his guitar tell all of it.

His “Star Spangled Banner” channeled the angst and anger, aggression and chaos that defined the era.

You don’t have to be a psychic or music expert

to hear the frustration and fear expressed by his guitar. To hear the bombers diving to release their payloads, the mournful wailing of anyone who lost a loved one in that war, those riots, or that domestic unrest. 

You don’t have to be in the military to recognize the way Hendrix worked “Taps” into his version, even as he tried to claim some vestige of hope in the midst of it all.

55 years later, America faces just as much to wail about 

There are still deep divisions over race and foreign policy. But now those divisions have gone mainstream because everybody has a phone or a social media account. And even though Ingrid Andress was intoxicated when she sang the “Star Spangled Banner,” her rendition defined this moment just as Hendrix defined his.

When her voice cracked at what so proudly we hail, the inflection signaled something far less than pride. Everything that came after that sounded croaky and hoarse until she reached the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air.

This may have been bad singing, but it was also comment

whether she meant it to be or not. To hear those words sung in that distorted and off-key manner was to hear the wailing and lamentation of Israel on October 7th and Gaza every day since.

There was nothing to be proud of in those rockets, those bombs. Francis Scott Key had something entirely different in mind when he composed the song during the War of 1812.

When Andress sang that our flag was still there, her voice served up a tattered, bedraggled flag that has become something other than its original meaning. 

This flag has been disgraced by political figures who wrap divisive rhetoric within its red, white, and blue folds. It was flown upside down by a Supreme Court justice (or his wife) and election deniers as they stormed the Capitol and called for the Vice President of the United States to be hanged.

By the time Ingrid Andress got to the land of the free and the home of the brave, her voice sounded like a strangled cat, gasping for air in its last moments. It was filled with Aristotelian pity and fear. Of clinging to the edge of a sinking ship and not having much faith in the outcome.

I’m not saying these things to be mean

But to point out the unwitting similarity between the Andress and Hendrix versions of our national anthem — and the way each rendition paints a portrait of our troubled times.

If Andress really was drunk, her performance lends credence to the Latin phrase in vino veritas. Although it wasn’t “Lady Like,” Ingrid Andress wound up telling the truth about the present moment. Now as in the past, we are teetering above an abyss. A moment of transition is upon us as the American experiment and democracy itself hangs in the balance.

It’s worth noting that Ingrid Andress graduated from the Berkelee School of Music, which has embraced experimental and atonal music for decades. At another time, under the influence of her “Lady Like” persona, she might have claimed to be reaching for the same improvisational ground as Esperanza Spalding, another graduate of that illustrious institution.

But Jazz and Country — those are different genres with separate audiences and income streams. Polarized, you might say, like the America we live in.

---

A few days after Andress sang the anthem

Judy Woodruff of the PBS NewsHour asked history professor Kevin Boyle, author of The Shattering: America in the 1960s, what it would take to heal our divided nation. And whether that might take place in the near term or over generations.

He said the evidence does not point to a near-term solution. In part, because there’s no one to inspire us to change how we think of ourselves— the way Martin Luther King, Jr., did.

Today we’re not just Americans with different opinions and perspectives, he said. We see each other as enemies. Half of us live in an evidence-based reality, while the other half lives in a faith-driven story that defines not only their politics—but who they are.

During the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King inspired us to think of ourselves as part of a beloved community in which we have a sense of obligation to each other. In other words, our fellow Americans are entitled to that commitment from the rest of us, whether their world view relies on fact or faith.

Unfortunately, we don’t seem to be very close to doing that just yet. But instead of waiting for another Dr. King, maybe we can do what Ingrid Andress did—but consciously. 

As she channeled Jimi Hendrix, why can’t the rest of us channel Dr. King, whose nonviolent movement channeled Mohandas K. Gandhi? Why can’t we take it upon ourselves to be the change we wish to see in the world? 

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill

Thanks for reading/listening. Don’t forget to hit that Like, Share, or Comment button.

Here’s a link to my previous post in case you missed it. Thanks!

Teddy Roosevelt was shot during the 1912 election — and lost. That incident & the 1968 Chicago convention haunt this year's race. But science says something other than history may play an even bigger role.