It’s time to cancel "The Star-Spangled Banner." Here’s what should replace it. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2020-07-14/national-anthem-star-spangled-banner-lean-on-me

Francis Scott Key wrote the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner” to commemorate the U.S. victory in the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812. Key was a slave owner, but it was also his role as a songwriter that has made him a target for recent protests.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2020-07-14/national-anthem-star-spangled-banner-lean-on-me

When Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the song in 2016, he said he was making a statement about racial injustice, not protesting the anthem itself. Now the wave of reckoning that is sweeping the country may have come for the problematic song.
https://www.latimes.com/sports/nfl/la-sp-kaepernick-anthem-protest-20160827-snap-story.html

There are also arguments against it on aesthetic grounds. It’s not an especially American song and its lyrics are ornate and Anglophile, with syntax that frustrates the efforts of normal humans to deduce who or what, exactly, is gleaming and streaming.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2020-07-14/national-anthem-star-spangled-banner-lean-on-me

Some have suggested the following replacements, but they fall short for various reasons: John Lennon’s “Imagine,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” “America the Beautiful” “God Bless America,” and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” We have another idea.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2020-07-14/national-anthem-star-spangled-banner-lean-on-me

Bill Withers’ 1972 soul ballad “Lean On Me” is a modest song with a tidy arrangement. The lyrics hold no pastoral images, no high-minded invocations of liberty or God. It's a deeply American song but it’s not, explicitly at least, a song about America.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2020-07-14/national-anthem-star-spangled-banner-lean-on-me

People sing it to pay tribute to essential workers and during Black Lives Matter protests. It's aimed at the level of everyday life. It says: What’s important is the stuff happening down here. The dramatis personae are you, me, all of us. We the people.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2020-07-14/national-anthem-star-spangled-banner-lean-on-me