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What are Anthems?

        First facts. Anthems are songs, noise with purpose. “Music is method,” writes Shana Redmond (1). She means that music is made using tried and true methods which affect how people perceive. Here’s one effect: music helps people imagine they are connected to people distant and distinct, across lands and laws of unique countries and creeds. Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and The Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (2013) analyzes anthems as political tools—imaginative practices curated often by states, elites, or religious institutions.

        Feeling, belief, and sound make anthems. Sounds make you feel or believe “[w]ithin the ancient Western traditions of the antiphon from which the word ‘anthem’ derives, [using] the call-and-response” (3). This is often about God or state. Someone of God or nation sings and expects to hear hymns of choruses long established.

        In practice anthems create their nation. Take a couple for example: “A mighty will, great glory,” Russians start, uniformly talking to their state— “are your heritage for all times!” A chorus, tuned and ready, returns: “Be glorious, country! We take pride in you!” ‘We’ create as ‘we’ sing—together addressing “you!” Anthems let singers and listeners imagine the ambiguous terms of states and Gods are shared. In doing so, a state is created from feeling, a crescendo of practiced camaraderie. ‘You’ can be Russia, America, both. Our ideas can discord in our sonic harmony. (We ask in the U.S., “O say can you see” our flag still standing after siege? I’ve never seen this flag. Still, the lyrics work, you’ll notice, in all the mass produced flags around cities.)

        War, God, pride. Star-Spangled banners and mighty wills. Anthems of state, of the hymn and prayer book, are inherited sounds meant to maintain what has already been imagined. Our inquiry here comes from a one question: Whose chorus are we in? Anthems must be listened to. We, studying Anthem, explore who listens and who sings, who makes noise, who can, and who can listen. We distrust anthems known for country and God. Why are they not songs, lost or known by few? The answer has been given: all songs create. These songs create what states need to sustain themselves—belief and feeling made by rehearsed noise.

        Our question led to new anthems, people, and questions. How do Nina Simone and Lorraine Hansberry create a new anthem? They were aware of a need for Black solidarity, and saw how music (and men) of the moment excluded Black women. How did Paul Robeson speak to workers and oppressed peoples around the world using a diminutive song written for white audiences? He traveled, protested, and sang for those people in need of solidarity in times of fear amidst World Wars and racial and national tension.

        Shana Redmond (2013) thought about songs loved against the ones inherited. “To be Young, Gifted and Black” is heard. “Ol’ Man River” is heard. “Lift Evr’y Voice and Sing” is heard. “We Shall Overcome” is heard. We define anthems as noise heard to create. “Lift Evr’y Voice and Sing,” by James Weldon Johnson and his brother, was the anthem of a Black liberation movement, a part of a culture in need of common creed. Indeed, “Black anthems are dense texts that expose the negotiations at work between the West and its Others, the marketplace and the commons, and the individual and the collective” (7).

        We explore what is being negotiated in what is popular, established not by state or religious council, but in what is needed and wanted. Anthems until now have been established noise heard by the establisher. We take seriously the anthems created in mainstream, made or reinterpreted for new moments, new needs.

 

Citation:

Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora, by Shana L.                      Redmond, NYU Press, 2014.