When Whitney Houston appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show in the early weeks of 1991, Arsenio’s other guest was Roseanne Barr, who had notoriously sung “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a San Diego Padres game the previous year. The host asked Barr if she had any advice for Whitney, whose performance at the Super Bowl XXV in Tampa was just weeks away. “Don’t grab your crotch and spit,” Barr replied. It was sort of funny, and also absurd, given how much more pressure Whitney would bear, as a Black woman singing the song on January 27, amid the heightened security and national panic that marked the first weeks of the Gulf War.

Whitney was tapped for the Super Bowl, one imagines, because of the potency of her Olympic ballad “One Moment in Time”—which proved, if not her patriotism, then her willingness to support fundamentally nationalist sports agendas. But her musical approach to the anthem was more pro-Black than pro-American. She and Rickey discussed versions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” she loved, especially Marvin Gaye’s minimalist rendition at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game. Gaye’s was perhaps the most inventive, not to say subversive, Black version of the anthem since Jimi Hendrix had shredded the song at Woodstock in 1969.

But while the tape played, she sang her heart out into a dead mic—a performance so fully embodied and perfectly synced to the tape that most people would never know the difference.

The video shows an impossibly cool Gaye in a sharp blue suit and a tie, his eyes concealed by tinted shades. His only accompaniment—a drum machine and a keyboard—has already started by the time he walks onto the court, adjusts the mic, and starts singing in a way that is more seductive than solemn. He parcels out phrases according to a pattern only he can discern, then steers the song back toward the original at “rockets’ red glare,” as if to prove he knows how it’s supposed to go, and is intentionally avoiding it. The crowd seems to both love this and not quite believe it is happening. It’s so audacious.

But Gaye’s rendition, while perhaps a bit mocking (“ thy star-spangled banner,” he sang, not “that”) was also so tender and skillful as to remake the booming song of American might and masculinity into an ode to Black musical ingenuity. By the time he was done, the home of the brave wasn’t America—it was any place people could plant their feet in the maelstrom of this country and be wholly themselves.

Whitney didn’t deconstruct the song like Gaye did, but she did take his version as proof of the song’s malleability. “It wasn’t rushed,” was how she described it to Rickey. “He was able to take his time.” Gaye had changed the time signature, from the oom-pah-pah European waltz time of 3/4 to the more standard (and more gospel) march of 4/4.

Whitney and Rickey did the same. Rickey also had the jazz bassist and bandleader John Clayton Jr. create an orchestral arrangement that synthesized jazz, classical, and gospel idioms. (Clayton had played in both the Count Basie Orchestra and the Amsterdam Phil-harmonic.) The result, as Rickey describes it, was “this crazy quilt of a classical orchestration with jazz and gospel influences, set to 4/4 time.” He flew to Tampa to record it with the symphony orchestra, but the conductor complained the arrangement was “too dissonant and strange.” Where Whitney, Rickey, and Clayton heard an innovative admixture, the conductor—presumably less experienced with such syncretism—heard a clash. Meanwhile, the NFL found the arrangement too slow. They feared people wouldn’t be able to sing along to it. Would Whitney rerecord it, they asked John? The answer from Whitney’s camp was simple: No.

The plan was for her to wear a sleeveless black cocktail dress with heels, Robyn says, in keeping with the orchestra’s formal attire. They’d anticipated warm weather in Florida. At the sound check that day, Whitney realized she’d freeze in the dress, so Robyn suggested the tracksuit she’d brought. Whitney did her own makeup, put on her Nike Cortez sneakers, and fastened an ivory bandana around her head. It’s now hard to imagine it otherwise.