How to Compose an Anthem for Your Generation

Do not try to compose an anthem for your generation. Get that idea out of your head. It is simply not how this works.

Don’t worry about your clothes or haircut or any of the songs on the radio or any of your friends’ bands.

Focus instead on breakfast, on getting the temperature of the maté right, on buttering your toast with the correct amount of butter, on standing at the window for a few seconds and trying to get a feel for the weather.

There is something in the air, something going around, something that can be sensed but that doesn’t have a name yet, a certain proportion of hope to despair, the scales having suddenly tipped.

Don’t think twice when the moment comes. Leave the notebook open and the mechanical pencil resting on its pages. Leave the dishes in the sink; the maté and thermos, on the counter. Leave your coat on the hook as you step out the door, as you step out into it. Feel its pull. Lose yourself in it. Let it cloud your vision. Abandon yourself to it, whatever it is.

Get on the crosstown bus, secure a window seat, and stay there until the end of the line. Squint your eyes and you will see it, almost, an image coming into focus, almost. Listen for a rustling, down at the bottom, in the tufts of dried grass, beneath the snow, and you will hear it, almost, hear it breathing, a pulse almost.

Image from The North Star (1969), written by Tamao Fujita and illustrated by Kota Taniuchi

When the doors of the bus open, take to the streets. Now you are in the middle of everything. You are there at the march, holding the line, holding up a sign, singing protest songs in three languages. You are there, and you are not there because you are at all the other protests as well, holding up all the other signs, singing all the other songs in all the other languages. It is you, but it is not you because you are all the other protesters, ushering in a world that is still just an idea.

Someone in a uniform pushes someone without a uniform. He pushes her to the ground. You are standing just a few feet away. You put yourself between them. This is not a decision you have made. It is a simple reflex. Anyone else would have done the same. You would like to think that the person without a uniform was able to scurry off to safety and has been reabsorbed into the mass of protesters, but you do not have time to check. Other uniforms have descended upon you, weapons drawn.

Their movements, as they hit you, are in excess of the needs of the situation, supernumerary. And there is something in that excess, a happening, unnamed, that informs everything you have been living, your generation. The uniforms grunt. You gasp, involuntarily, let out a sigh. In a language that everyone can understand, the word slips out. It escapes from your mouth, out into the world, taking on a life of its own. It is the first time that the name has been pronounced.

Something has shifted, however small. The gears, it seems, grind to a halt, the clubs now frozen in mid-air. The men in uniforms, it seems, are suddenly naked. Their clubs have gone soft. The baselessness of their claim to power has been exposed, right there on the pavement, for all eyes to see. 

They will cower and scurry as you rise up, now so much bigger than yourself, brandishing your instrument. You have been practicing years for this moment, learning the fretboard, memorizing the scales, sequencing the chords, penning the slogans, going to the protests, holding up the signs, without ever getting it quite right. But this is something different. This is no rehearsal. You are simply responding. The notes fall into the line. The melody follows the contours of the situation, a perfect fit.

It is not something that you can plan, an anthem. You fall to the ground with a thud and the notes spill out, like blood from the corner of your mouth, perhaps. They seep out into the world, picking up speed as they go, flesh on the bone, and arrange themselves into a melody, the song on everyone’s lips, a whole generation, awakening at last

to its own power.  

Image from Let's Find Out About Streets (1969), written by Valerie Pitt and illustrated by Sheila Granda