When the Song Refuses to Stop

On music, resistance, and the human refusal to be silenced

This morning, during my normal scroll through my Instagram feed, I stopped at an Outlook post featuring Ali Ghamsari, a young Iranian musician playing his instrument at the gates of the Damavand Power Plant — playing on, in the face of Trump's announcement of the annihilation of Persian civilization. The post also featured another musician, Hamidreza Afrideh. His music school had crumbled back to earth. He played sitting on its ruins.

The post was nothing extraordinary. I see images from war every single day and scroll past. But somehow this resistance — the refusal to accept the status quo, to accept the face of power — stopped me. It reminded me of Joan Baez singing Kris Kristofferson's line: "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." It reminded me of a book I hold very close to my heart — The Bravest Man in the World by Patricia Polacco — the story of Wallace Hartley, the bandmaster on the Titanic, who kept playing for all the men, women and children on board in the face of inevitable death.

My thought buds were now awake, deep in the realization of how hope has been fostered by music during different periods of darkness that has come to torment us again and again.

Few forces in human history have proven as durable, portable, or subversive as music. Where words on a page could be seized and burned, a song could be memorised, whispered, and passed from one generation to the next. Where formal political organisation was crushed, communal singing could still gather people under a shared emotional truth. Across centuries and continents, music has served as a vehicle for resistance — encoding dissent in metaphor when direct speech was too dangerous, unifying communities under oppression, and preserving the memory of struggle when other records were erased.

You can see such instances all over the globe. Here are a few that I keep returning to.

1. India's Song of Independence: Resistance to British Colonial Rule (1870s–1947)

India's struggle for independence was fought not only in courtrooms, on salt flats, and in prison cells, but in the realm of song. Music became one of the most effective means of spreading nationalist ideas and rallying people who had no access to newspapers or formal political organisations — which is to say, most of India.

Vande Mataram, written in 1870 by civil servant Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay — himself working under the British administration — was conceived in part as a response to the British imposition of "God Save the Queen" as the anthem for Indian subjects. First performed publicly at the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress, it spread rapidly. The British subsequently banned it, making its recitation a criminal offence — which, inevitably, made singing it an even more charged act of defiance. People were arrested for it; others sang it louder.

Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel laureate, made an extraordinary contribution through his Rabindra Sangeet. His "Amar Sonar Bangla," composed during the 1905 anti-partition movement, later became the national anthem of Bangladesh. His "Jana Gana Mana" — speaking of India's unity across language, region, and faith — became the national anthem of independent India.

The Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) brought a more organised approach, combining accessible folk melodies with explicitly political themes of anti-imperialism, democracy, and social justice. Their "Songs of People's War" were designed to be easily understood and sung by common people — enabling grassroots mobilisation at a scale that formal political communication could not always reach.

2. African American Spirituals and the Civil Rights Movement (1800s–1960s)

One of the most sustained traditions of musical resistance in history began with the enslaved. The songs known as the American Negro Spirituals were folk compositions created during the Middle Passage across the Atlantic and on the plantations of the American South. Beyond their spiritual function, they served a communicative purpose — allowing enslaved people to speak of their circumstances, longings, and even plans in a shared coded language that their captors often could not fully decode.

The tradition found its most politically organised expression during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when freedom songs became the soundtrack of demonstrations, marches, and mass meetings. "We Shall Overcome," "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round," and Sam Cooke's 1964 anthem "A Change Is Gonna Come" were not merely background music but active instruments of mobilisation. As research from Penn State has demonstrated, freedom songs were particularly powerful for Black women who participated in the movement but were often denied formal leadership roles — music democratised the movement, giving voice to those the formal structures excluded. Lyrics were altered in real time, naming segregation, naming police chiefs, naming the specific forms of injustice being contested.

The tradition persists today. Songs central to the Civil Rights Movement have been adapted by contemporary movements, and artists like Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, and Janelle Monáe carry forward its moral and political demands.

The latest film Sinners, which created a wave at this year's Oscars, portrays this in a visceral manner.

3. Hum Dekhenge: When a Communist Poet Beat a Dictator at His Own Game (1979–Present)

In 1979, Faiz Ahmad Faiz — Pakistan's great Marxist poet, writing from exile in Beirut under General Zia-ul-Haq's military dictatorship — wrote a nazm that turned the dictator's own weapon against him. Drawing on Quranic imagery and the Islamic idea of the Day of Judgement, Faiz transformed it into a Day of Revolution: the day when thrones fall and the oppressed take their seat. A Communist poet had made the Islamist state's own scripture an indictment of its rule. The poem was smuggled into Pakistan and published in a newspaper, circulating with a double meaning — the end of Zia's regime, or divine reckoning. Both felt inevitable.

What made it immortal was a single act of defiance. On 13 February 1986, Iqbal Bano — one of Pakistan's greatest classical singers — stood before a 50,000-strong crowd at the Alhamra Arts Council in Lahore and sang Hum Dekhenge in defiance of the ban on Faiz's poetry, clad in a black sari — the very garment Zia had banned as un-Islamic. There is no video; authorities cut the lights and microphones. But the audio survives, and in it you can hear fifty thousand voices erupt in Inqilaab Zindabad. The regime barred Bano from public performance. The ban, as bans on songs tend to do, made it immortal.

The poem has since found new homes in every new crisis. It was sung against Musharraf in Pakistan in the early 2000s, and during India's anti-CAA protests of 2019–2020, at Shaheen Bagh and Jantar Mantar — flowing seamlessly from readings of the Indian Constitution's Preamble. When an IIT Kanpur faculty member alleged it was "anti-Hindu," the irony was complete: the very stanza he objected to was the one Zia's regime had banned for quoting the Quran.

Written by a Communist to defeat an Islamist dictator, it had managed to disturb two entirely different orthodoxies with the same lines.

What Music Does That Other Resistance Cannot

Music is memorable and transmissible — a song survives where pamphlets burn and organisations are dismantled, carried in the memory of a community indefinitely, available to be picked up again when the next crisis arrives.

It operates in registers that direct speech cannot reach — encoding grief, defiance, and hope in forms that pass through censorship, because their meanings can be deniable, or because they strike the heart before the mind can object.

It creates community. The act of singing together constitutes a social bond that sustains people through the long, grinding work of resistance — participatory in a way that most political communication simply is not.

And it documents. The protest songs of every era have become historical records — evidence of what people felt, believed, and refused to accept, in ways that official archives rarely capture.

Ali Ghamsari at the gates of a power plant.

Hamidreza Afrideh on the rubble of his music school.

Wallace Hartley on the deck of the Titanic.

Iqbal Bano in a black sari before fifty thousand people.

The song, in each case, is not the last resort. It is the first assertion of something the powerful cannot take away.

Music does not, by itself, overthrow governments. But it may be the most reliable technology humanity has ever developed for keeping the spirit of resistance alive long enough that other forms of change become possible.