We tend to take for granted that sporting events will have music, from live renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” to DJs spinning popular bangers that function as hype songs. Only its absence draws our attention. But from the performers’ perspective, especially at a time when our nation feels extremely polarized, fulfilling that function can be more than just a gig. It can serve as personal or political expression.
Recall Bad Bunny’s historic and folkoric Super Bowl halftime show, performed in Spanish and rich in Puerto Rican imagery. The intensity of the uproar it generated was a reminder that sporting events function as shared, and sometimes contested, civic spaces.
A wide array of Americans, from Bad Bunny and millions of other Spanish speakers to the alternative halftime organizers, feel a sense of ownership of how those spaces are used.
The national anthem first found an enthusiastic and consistent embrace at major league baseball games while World War I raged and the nation was on edge. Even after wartime, the custom continued, and spread to other sports. From there, music took on an even greater role, with popular songs accentuating pivotal moments of competition, amping up the crowd and filling the downtime, until creating bangers specifically for that function became a specialty. Think: Jock Jams.
A brand new queer country trio called the Cowgays will soon sing the anthem at the Nashville Predators’ Pride night.
Thanks to the popularity of “Heated Rivalry,” there’s extra buzz around Preds Pride night this year. Even more notable is the fact that this trio, comprised of solo artists Adam Mac, Brooke Eden and Chris Housman, is making its official live debut providing the patriotic moment at this big sporting event.
Eden told me it’s the chance for The Cowgays to make a statement.
“America is in such a strange place right now, and to be a presence for the queer community, especially in country music, I do think that it is this responsibility,” she says. A responsibility “to show up in spaces like this, and show up singing the national anthem, and show up in our frickin’ country and western gear, being that visibility.”
Mac considers their upcoming performance, as well as and the numerous clips and photos they’ve chosen to shoot in front of an American flag background, ways of “reclaiming what it means to be patriotic, what it means to be in this country and those American symbols.”
Then there’s the hype song that Nashville rapper Daisha McBride recently created for Athletes Unlimited Pro, a professional women’s basketball league scheduled during the WNBA offseason.
This was the second time that AUPro commissioned McBride’s rhyming and hook-crafting abilities. She’s got plenty of experience writing to briefs that specify the desired vibe for music meant to soundtrack ads, tv shows and so on (a side of the music industry that will be explored in the next episode of the Music Citizens podcast).
But she told me that getting hired to make that track meant more than a paycheck.
“It was not only to be able to provide the vibes, but I really am a women’s basketball fan,” she emphasizes. “I actually do watch a lot of the players who came and played this season. So it was really cool to get to meet with them and connect with them. I’ve been waiting for something like this in Nashville.”
Supplying the music, along with performing during a halftime show at the beginning of the season, was a way for McBride to demonstrate her support for women’s sports in her city and show solidarity as an artist who’s a woman of color backing a league largely built on the talent of Black and brown women.
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