Republic or Death! (11 page)

We talk a bit about his background. He claims to have been politically awakened at school, partly because he had to sing the anthem every day – ‘a slavish eulogy to one man'. He didn't feel he'd found an anthem for himself, he adds, until he sang ‘The Internationale', ‘the song of workers all over the world'. I decide not to mention that his background isn't one shared by many workers – Baburam came from a peasant family but spent most of his youth doing degrees in India – and instead tell him I was surprised to learn just how important music was to the people's war. The Maoists didn't just stop the anthem, they also tried to ban Hindi music and to get people singing songs in their own ethnic languages.

‘Of course it was important,' he says. ‘We used music to arouse the feelings of the people and to inculcate in them a political consciousness. It's a very effective tool. All Nepal's different ethnicities, its women, and the so-called lower caste, none of those groups used to be able to express themselves, and so we encouraged them to show their cultural identity. They liked us for it; no one had done that before.' He says that's the one undeniably good thing about the new anthem: it sounds Nepalese. It sounds like the country expressing its identity rather than copying other people's.

At this point we've been talking all of six minutes, but Baburam's press secretary looks as if he's going to have a heart attack. He keeps leaning forward trying to get my attention so he can draw the interview to a close, only to slump back in annoyance when I ignore him. He looks as though he's having to strain every muscle in his face to stop himself from shouting, ‘STOP TALKING! WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS!' (They actually were, I learned later: Nepal's Supreme Court having ordered Baburam's government to agree a new constitution within days.) I realise I'm pushing my luck, so I say I have one final question.

‘When you said earlier the anthem's “okay for the time being”, does that mean you'll one day replace it?'

‘Everything is temporary in the world, nothing is absolute. All the world keeps on changing,' he says, sounding oddly like a Buddhist monk for a supposedly anti-religious Maoist. And with that he gets up, grabs my hand for some photos – the photographer's flash so strong it forces me to close my eyes, ruining them all – and then he's gone: the most intelligent man in Nepal; one of its heart-throbs. As I'm walking out, I bump into one of his underlings from earlier. ‘Did you tell him about your friends?' he asks, excitedly. ‘Did he know them too?'

*

It's several months and several thousand miles later, and I'm in Folkestone, Kent, the heart of England. I'm in a community centre full of Nepalese getting drunk on cheap lager. Most of them are connected to the Gurkhas, the Nepalese regiments serving under the British army nearby. But up on stage is Pradip Kumar Rai, under his poet's alias Byakul Maila. There's a queue of people waiting to put garlands around his neck, although he's got so many around him already he appears to have grown to twice his size, becoming comically obese.

The Nepalese anthem – his anthem – is playing on a loop over the speakers; a recording of some high-pitched women singing over Amber's keyboard and drums. That music seems completely out of place in the cold hall, especially after someone puts the disco lights on, but it doesn't appear to bother Pradip or anyone else. Everyone is smiling. In this room, finally, the anthem doesn't mean politics, or conjure images of kings and uprisings. It just means home.

It's the music that's key to that. If a trumpet flourish was looping out of those speakers now, everyone would feel as though they'd have to stand to attention, waiting to boredly salute whichever dignitary was passing through. But thanks to Amber's tune, no one's looking bored. They're swigging from super-strength beer cans, they're singing to their children and getting them to clap and dance along. It could be any Saturday night. It could be the final of a Nepalese talent contest, Pradip declared the winner for a beautiful poem. I stand there and make a little wish that one day this tune
is
played at an Olympics. Everyone in the stadium would be utterly confused, but they'd feel a little happier for having heard a song so different and so uplifting.

 

NASHVILLE IS LITTLE
more than a handful of skyscrapers rising out of the Tennessee countryside but, as a great many billboards tell you, it's the home of country music. So many people have made their names here – Elvis, Dolly Parton, Taylor Swift – that it's no surprise everyone you meet is either a singer, an aspiring singer or someone who, y'know, writes a few songs now and then, just for fun. It doesn't matter if they're young girls in fifties shades and leopard-print hot pants, or sixty-something men in suits and ties, sweating in the heat – they'd all grab a guitar given half a chance. Some people have even crossed continents for a shot at making it. Last night I saw an all-Japanese country band in a bar on the east side of town. They looked completely incongruous in their rhinestone-studded boots and red tasselled shirts, the frontman tipping his Stetson after every number, yet they somehow had the drawl of true Southerners, and their songs made them sound as if they'd gone through three wives each and just as many jails. They were fantastic.

But I'm pretty sure Nashville would lose all its allure for that band if they were with me now. I'm standing in the city's baseball stadium, home of the Nashville Sounds. It's a beautiful March morning, sun streaming down from a cloudless sky. Two groundsmen are on the field: one watering the grass, creating rainbows with flicks of his wrist; the other carefully rolling sand into place. Freight trains are passing in the distance, the sound of their horns drifting across the stadium. It's an idyllic scene, the sort that makes you think you've at last found that mythical ‘small-town America' (despite being in a city of 700,000). Or at least it would be an idyllic scene, if it weren't for the sound coming from behind the batting cage – an out-of-tune wail that seems to be growing louder and more piercing with each second.

‘O say can you SEEEEEEEEEE,' it starts, the singer somehow managing to hit five different notes in that final one-syllable word, ‘by the dawn's early LIGHTTTTT.'

The girl making this racket looks all of eight years old. She's wearing a pink polka-dot dress, and has her hands nervously clasped in front of her. At any other time, the audience would be smiling and nudging each other – ‘Ain't she cute?' – and when she got to the end, they'd give her a standing ovation just for having the courage to get up in front of several hundred people and sing her country's anthem.

Unfortunately for her, everyone here has spent the last hour and a half watching people mangle that anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner', over and over, and over again. We've watched children lisp their way through it and groups of soccer moms with matching scarves struggle to sing it in harmony. We've watched jocks grind to a halt after three lines, the words slipping embarrassingly from their grasp, and we've seen gospel singers add twists and turns to it, to the point it seemed like it'd never end. No one has any charity left. Each of those people was auditioning to sing before one of the Sounds' home games this season.

One of the judges turns to me. ‘Shoot me now,' he whispers. I look at his judging sheet. We're only on number 51. There's at least 100 to go. I decide not to tell him I'm due up in an hour.

*

Americans play their anthem so much it sometimes feels as if they're worried they'll forget it. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' is sung before baseball games, basketball games, American football and ice hockey matches, at political rallies, school bake sales, even supermarket openings. When someone sings it brilliantly, it makes the news. When someone sings it horribly, it stays news for days. Thailand is the only country that seems to come close to that devotion. There, their anthem is played every day at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., leading to strange scenes of people standing to attention in train stations and shopping mall food courts. But those renditions are required by law; they're not voluntary and spontaneous, like you get here.

Before coming to America, I'd decided an audition like this was the best place to witness this apparent love for the song. I was sure the stadium would be filled with super-patriots: women who'd take the stage in dresses stitched out of the flag, or who'd break down in tears halfway through, overcome with memories of family who'd died in service. I'd leave the stadium with stories of heartbreak and bravery, maybe even some romance (‘We met singing it. I can't resist a man who nails his anthem'). Unfortunately no one I've met so far has lived up to that fantasy.

I've met patriots, of course – men in Vietnam War trucker caps who've told me that ‘when someone butchers the anthem, it's like they're trampling on the flag' or who've complained that no one's wearing a suit (‘Where's the respect?'). But most people have simply been singers desperate to win one of Nashville's prime talent contests. The only real exception has been a scruffy thirty-something librarian called Gib Baxter, who I found sitting at the back with his blue-haired, bubblegum-blowing girlfriend. She'd forced him to come. ‘It's a “Get out, conquer your fears” thing,' he said. ‘I'm quite an anxious person.' He held up his hands. ‘I'm trying to stop biting my nails too.' I decided not to point out he was only succeeding on three fingers.

Perhaps I should actually have expected this crowd. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' may be an everyday occurrence here, but it's also a song that's difficult to love, no matter how patriotic you are. For a start, it's bloody hard to sing. It has a range of an octave and a half – something few other anthems get close to (although South Korea's used to reach such heights that in 2014 they changed its key to make it easier for post-pubescent boys to sing). That means you have to start uncomfortably low or finish uncomfortably high, whoever you are. That range almost stopped it becoming the country's anthem. Days before it was chosen, Congress ordered the Navy Band to come to Washington and prove it was actually singable. They wisely took along a professional.

The song is also full of olde worlde language – words like ‘o'er', phrases like ‘foul … pollution' – that hasn't been used in everyday speech since the time it was written. And there are just a lot of other patriotic American songs around begging people to love them more: real heart-grabbers like ‘America the Beautiful', which glides across the landscape from ‘amber waves of grain' to ‘purple mountain majesties'; or ‘God Bless America', which any three-year-old could learn to impress their grandparents (‘God bless America, land that I love'). Sometimes you get the feeling most Americans would be happiest if Bruce Springsteen donated ‘Born in the USA' to the country in his will (the chorus only, obviously). It makes you wonder if ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' really does have a hold on people here, or it's simply a tradition that can't be shaken off; whether the people who stand for it every day are doing so because it's the most important song in the country, or just because they've been nagged so many times by their mums.

*

It's taken me all of ten seconds to realise I'm not as good a singer as that eight-year-old girl. I'm standing behind the batting cage staring up at the three judges, and all of them are looking at me pleadingly as if to say, ‘Please, just stop singing.'

‘Ooooo sayyyyy cannnnn youuuuu seeeeeeeeee,' I bellow, far slower than you're meant to. It's like I've suddenly developed a speech impediment. The judges and the audience must think I've forgotten the words and am dragging each one out to give myself time to think. ‘Byyyyy theeeee dawwwwwnnnnn'sssss earrrrrrllllllyyyyy lighhhhhttttt.' I realise my hands are shaking, my nerves coming to the surface. I dread to think how large the sweat patches are on my shirt. ‘WhaTTTTT so proudly we hailed at the TWIlight's last gleaming,' I manage, finally picking up pace but my voice now wobbling wildly for some reason, like it's about to break. And this is only line two. I've got six to go. Unless something changes soon people are going to start booing. But then an idea suddenly pops into my panicked head – the crowd. There are several hundred people out there. Get them to hide the disaster this is becoming. So I pump a fist as if I'm actually getting into it, and I wave at them to stand up. I point the microphone at them too as if to say, ‘C'mon, sing with me …'

And magically – wonderfully – it works. Well, sort of. One person joins in. She's middle-aged, with platinum-blonde hair and gaudy shades that cover half her face. She's probably the mother of an equally bad auditionee, but I don't care. She claps. She shouts, ‘USA! USA!' She waves at everyone to join her; everyone laughs. I fix my gaze on her as though she's my first girlfriend and I don't let go until I reach the end. That takes another minute or so, but when I finally sing, ‘The land of the FREEEEEE and the home of the BRAVVVVVE?' straining to hit those high notes, I finish an exhausted, exhilarated mess.