Colin - no relation to Conor - Oberst won the Hockey Night in Canada new anthem challenge with his entry Canadian Gold, beating out 13-year-old Robert Fraser Burke's Sticks to the Ice and (somehow) Logan Aube's Hockey Scores. (previously)
posted by mannequito on Oct 12, 2008 - 35 comments

Have you ever wondered what the national anthem of Bolivia, Nepal or The Republic of Seychelles sounded like? Well wonder no more because NationalAnthems.info has got you covered! It claims to have the national anthem for every country in the world in MIDI format, along with downloadable lyrics and sheet music so you can sing and play along. But if the MIDI format isn't doing it for you, there's also other sites that you can visit that have downloadable MP3s of pretty much every national anthem this planet and its inhabitants have to offer, such as this one or this one, which is notable in that the anthems featured there were performed by the US Navy Band. And finally, for your further reading and listening pleasure, check out this forum which contains background information on and even more links to downloadable national anthems.
posted by Effigy2000 on Sep 22, 2008 - 14 comments

A week before Jimi Hendrix died in London he (probably) recorded the Welsh anthem "Land of our Fathers" (embedded audio). The eight-track recording languished in a corner of a recording studio until recently.
posted by Rumple on Dec 31, 2006 - 30 comments

Russian Anthems Museum.
posted by hama7 on Nov 6, 2006 - 11 comments

Advance Australia Fair, written by a Scotsman and performed at the inauguration of the Commonwealth, has never been a hugely popular anthem. The ARU have been boosting Waltzing Matilda (a paean to a thief who got caught, which was considered as an anthem in the 70s but rejected) as a national song for Rugby internationals, while Men At Work's backpacker anthem Land Down Under can be heard almost constantly in bars from Ko Pha Ngan to Earl's Court, and the Chisels' song Khe Sahn gets a better pagerank than the battle it is named for.

But I think Adam Hills may have returned the anthem to relevance with this rendition.
posted by pompomtom on Aug 17, 2006 - 34 comments

Corporate anthems as a musical genre and a marketing tool. There are lots to listen to here, including the Open Source Song.
posted by joaovc on May 17, 2005 - 12 comments

New US National Anthem? Slate's Dialogue this week is about alternatives to "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the US national anthem. Should we keep it? If we replaced it, what should we replace it with?
posted by kirkaracha on Oct 1, 2001 - 57 comments

So I had a big fight in the car tonight with my friend Lisa over an issue I brought up on an earlier MeFi thread--(that issue being those Titanic-radio-remixes of news soundbites with popular songs). See, her dad works on the radio and she was saying that putting those things together was a way for the radio community to acknowledge last week's tragedy. "It comforts people," she argued. I argued back that packaging it like that minimalizes it and makes it too easy to digest. I conceded, though, that if someone were to write a song about what went on---a tasteful, appropriate song---I'd be all for them playing that on the radio. And then there was the Magi with his gift---the completely cringe-worthy Crosby, Stills & Nash song that they performed tonight on Jay Leno. What was that? Did anyone hear it? Did anyone like it? WHY?
posted by adrober on Sep 18, 2001 - 22 comments