About 2,400 years ago Plato warned that new styles of music were dangerous. In The Republic, Socrates says that "when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them" (in Benjamin Jowett's 1871 translation). Rulers have believed him ever since. Music binds groups together, slips messages past censors and stirs strong feeling, so governments, churches and movements all try to use it or control it.

Anthems: singing the nation

A national anthem turns a crowd into a people, at least for a few minutes. "La Marseillaise" was written in one night in April 1792 by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, an army officer in Strasbourg. Volunteers from Marseille sang it as they marched into Paris, and it took their city's name. "La Marseillaise" began as a war song for the French army before becoming France's anthem, and later regimes, including Napoleon's empire and the restored monarchy, sidelined or banned it as too revolutionary.

"The Star-Spangled Banner" began as a poem by Francis Scott Key, who watched the British bombard Fort McHenry in 1814; it became the official US anthem only in 1931. In 1900 the brothers James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing" for schoolchildren in Jacksonville, Florida, to mark Lincoln's birthday, and it became known as the Black national anthem. South Africa's anthem since 1997 joins verses of "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika," a hymn composed by Enoch Sontonga in 1897 and sung for decades by the liberation movement, with the apartheid era anthem "Die Stem," combining songs once sung by opposing sides into one anthem in five languages, as a gesture of reconciliation.

Protest songs

Workers' movements spread songs because people who sing together feel braver together. Joe Hill, a songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World, set new words to familiar hymn tunes so anyone could join in; after he was executed in Utah in 1915, he became a martyr of the labor movement.

The civil rights movement in the United States ran on singing. Activists adapted spirituals and hymns into freedom songs. "We Shall Overcome" grew from a gospel hymn by Charles Albert Tindley published around 1900, reshaped by striking workers and by teachers at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, and was sung at marches, in churches and in jail cells. Freedom songs kept up courage, taught nonviolent discipline and let people facing police dogs act together without panic. In 1939 Billie Holiday recorded "Strange Fruit," Abel Meeropol's song picturing lynching victims as fruit hanging from Southern trees; her record label declined to release it, so a small label did, and it became one of the most powerful protest songs ever recorded.

Censorship

Where music is powerful, it is also controlled. Nazi Germany banned jazz from the radio and suppressed music by Jewish composers. In the Soviet Union in 1936, Pravda, the party newspaper, attacked Dmitri Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in an unsigned article soon after Stalin walked out of a performance. Shostakovich, fearing arrest, withdrew a new symphony and wrote for the rest of his life under the eyes of the state. Apartheid South Africa's state broadcaster banned many songs, and the Chilean singer Víctor Jara was tortured and murdered after the 1973 military coup. The Taliban banned most music in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 and again after returning to power in 2021.

Not every restriction comes from dictators. In 1985 the Parents Music Resource Center, founded by the wives of several Washington politicians, pressed for labels on albums with explicit lyrics, and US Senate hearings followed. The campaign led the record industry to adopt warning labels on explicit albums, the familiar "Parental Advisory" sticker. Defenders saw labels as information for parents, not censorship; critics, including musicians who testified, feared stores would refuse to stock labeled records. The debate echoes Plato: may a society shield the young from music, and who decides what counts as harmful?

Worked example: the Singing Revolution

Estonia has held a national song festival since 1869, when choirs met in Tartu under Russian imperial rule to sing in Estonian. After the Soviet Union annexed Estonia in 1940, the festivals went on under Soviet control, but choirs still sang in Estonian. Lydia Koidula's poem "My Fatherland Is My Love," set by Gustav Ernesaks in 1944, became an unofficial anthem that crowds sang even when officials dropped it from the program.

In 1988, as Soviet control loosened, Estonians gathered night after night at the Tallinn song festival grounds to sing banned patriotic songs. A rally there in September drew roughly 300,000 people, about a fifth of all Estonians. In 1989 some two million people across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined hands in a human chain, the Baltic Way. Estonia restored its independence in August 1991 with almost no bloodshed.

Singing did not defeat the Soviet Union by itself; economic crisis and reform in Moscow mattered enormously. But song let people show their numbers, unity and refusal while staying nonviolent, and a singing crowd is hard to portray as a mob. Music is not only something we hear. It is something people do together, and doing it together can change what they believe is possible.