A good Olympic anthem for the United States needs to do one major thing: inspire. It needs to inspire athletes to win. It also needs to inspire viewers to shed a few tears of joy and pride for their native land. It's a lot of things for one song to do, but Katy Perry's new single "Rise" will try and do just that this year. NBC announced Perry's track will be the official song of the 2016 Rio Olympics, so get ready to hear this song over and over for 16 days straight. But is Perry's song good enough to go for the gold? Can it really inspire a whole country to win? To figure out the answer to these questions, it's best to look at Olympic anthems of years past to see how Perry's latest single stacks up to the greatest songs of previous Games.
Perry's anthem certainly isn't as weird as Björk's for the 2004 Athens Games. The Icelandic star's song, "Oceania," was entirely composed of human voices, for one. But, like Björk, Perry's new song does benefit from being different then most other Olympic songs. First of all, her song is nowhere as big as Dion's or Houston's, or as classic.
Let's be honest, their songs sound like Olympic songs, as if they were generated by some song-making machine. And to a point, they were, since Houston's and Dion's songs were written by career songwriters. Perry, like Björk, benefits from taking a risk and trying something new. Perry's "Rise" is far more electronic than any previous Olympic song and because of that sounds like a song from 2016.