The Argentina Story
Do me a favor. Open a private tab, and google “national anthems ranked.”
Somewhere near the top, the second result when I’m searching it, should be “We ranked every national anthem,” an article… I wrote.
Seem weird? You don’t know the half of it.
It all started in April, 2021…
I won’t belabor the point on the article itself, you can read it here if you wish.
Very quickly, the article started going viral. Like, 150,000 views on a student newspaper’s website viral. True patriots, definitely not from said countries, flocked from around the world to inform us that “Actually, X country has the world’s most beautiful anthem by far!”
But, ok, let’s talk Argentina.
A year after the piece was posted, random users in Argentina found my staff-mandated, literally-unused Central Times Twitter account. Some of them followed it, others @’d me, and I Google Translated their messages to chat with them.
The story was supposed to end there.
Then, August 2023 happened.
I woke up to an email from a local Argentinian news reporter, asking me for an interview. Nationalism was surging in Argentina around this time, and the piece had exploded again.
This story was getting covered in the funniest way possible. “Argentina declared World’s Best Anthem” was the angle many of these Argentinian news outlets went with… Because a high schooler, 2.5 years earlier, liked it.
When the reporter sent me these screenshots, I knew what I had to do.
A few weeks later, I appeared on the TV news on Myriam Azcurra’s show in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. During the interview, her 20 year old daughter got on the call to personally thank me.
Truly one of the wildest sidequests I’ve ever been a part of.