The News
Kyrgyzstan has announced it will change its national anthem, saying the one it has is too Soviet.
After Kyrgyzstan became independent following the fall of the USSR in 1991, it changed the lyrics of its existing anthem — but the country’s president now says the words are too limited, because they only celebrate independence and not the “5,000-year-old history” of the Kyrgyz people.
National anthems are relatively new: Early modern European states often had songs for royal families, but only in the 19th century as nation states became the norm, did they become paeans to the countries themselves.
The Olympic Games entrenched them further from 1920, when anthems began to be played at medal ceremonies, pushing countries that lacked an official anthem to get one.