But you need never have seen that great video to hear a sound growing out of the rubbery, underwater guitar chords that open the song that could reduce buildings, and everything that surrounded it on the charts, to rubble. Seven years later, its contradictions are nowhere close to being resolved. And the way Martina McBride, the finest mainstream country singer of the decade, heads into those mysteries is still thrilling. It's sung by a woman remembering the Fourth of July when she was eight. While she's at the town fair, her mother sets fire to the house, killing herself and her abusive drunk of a husband.
Nothing here is that tidy.
Years later, time hasn't begun to heal any of the wounds. But when McBride shifts into the chorus what you hear is a kind of glory. It's Independence Day. In that moment McBride focuses the song's juxtaposition of independence as national institution and banal abstraction with independence in action. But as surely as the punks did.