Christina Aguilera is probably fuming at her timing right now. Judging by the amount of buzz she’s garnering this morning she should have sung the National Anthem’s words wrong before the release of her last movie, the not-quite-worldbeating Burlesque.
SB Nation’s official take is that she went off the rails at the 40-second mark, though we have no idea whether or not she managed to hit the over on that 1:54 prop bet from earlier in the week. (She threatened, at the end, to spend a minute and 54 seconds on the last word alone, which is the bane of all National Anthem purists.)
We can’t act as though she hadn’t warned us more than 10 years ago that this might happen. In “Genie in a Bottle” she clearly suggests that if we want to be with her (in a National Anthem sense), baby there’s a price to pay—she’s a genie in a bottle, and as such hasn’t had a lot of chances to hear the Star-Spangled Banner performed in English. She’d have nailed it in Arabic, whether you rubbed her the right way or not.