Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter discusses the relationship between anthems and pop in the history of popular music in the United States, including patriotic pop songs and pop performances of national anthems; pop songs that served as unofficial anthems for social movements or other nonstate collective identities in the 1960s and 1970s; hit songs that were described as anthemic or as anthems despite having no apparent link to a social group; and pop songs that overtly declared themselves to be anthems. The chapter illuminates the ways in which pop music can consolidate and amplify not just specific collective identities but also less determinate kinds of togetherness, including vague, atmospheric, privatized, and disjunctive constructions of collectivity. The changing relationship between pop and the anthemic reveals how even pop anthems that might seem indifferent to questions of national or group belonging have managed to perform, represent, and intervene in collective and national life.</jats:p>