[Verse 1] Talk about borders, inked on a map, that's the state, a bureaucratic trap, passports, parliaments, a throne or a court, power with a paper trail, official report. But a nation's different, it's a feeling you keep, kin you've never met but you'd defend in your sleep, shared story, shared anthem, a flag you salute, marry the two together, you get the nation-state's root. [Chorus] State is the skeleton, nation is the skin, stitch them together, let the myth settle in, one needs a passport, one needs a song, nation-state's the wedding where both feel they belong, remember the hyphen, remember it twice, state plus nation equals paradise or price. [Verse 2] Benedict Anderson said close your eyes, picture a stranger you'll never recognize, yet you call them countryman, sister in print, newspapers binding you by ink and by hint, novels in your language, same morning gazette, "imagined community," don't you forget, printing presses rolling, capitalism's news, built the we from nothing, gave millions a muse. [Verse 3] Gellner says it's the smokestacks, not the soul, factories needed workers who could read a whole manual, a signpost, a common tongue to share, industrial engines demanding mass welfare of schoolrooms and standard grammar for the job, turned the scattered village into a nationalist mob, not malice, just machinery wanting one voice, industrialization made nationhood the choice. [Chorus] State is the skeleton, nation is the skin, stitch them together, let the myth settle in, one needs a passport, one needs a song, nation-state's the wedding where both feel they belong, remember the hyphen, remember it twice, state plus nation equals paradise or price. [Verse 4] Now the scholars split, two camps on the floor: primordialists swear nations were here before, atavistic bloodlines, ancient and true, tribal embers glowing, nothing really new. Modernists laugh, call the whole thing a palimpsest— old parchment scraped clean, fresh ink on the rest, elites wrote "nation" over tribes long erased, tradition's invented, freshly packaged, replaced. [Bridge] Nineteen-eighteen, Wilson took the stage, fourteen points scribbled on history's page, "let each people govern the soil they call home," self-determination, a promissory poem. Empires cracked open, new flags hit the breeze, colonies demanded their own set of keys, but drawing the lines where no line agreed planted the conflicts that still bleed and bleed. [Chorus] State is the skeleton, nation is the skin, stitch them together, let the myth settle in, one needs a passport, one needs a song, nation-state's the wedding where both feel they belong, remember the hyphen, remember it twice, state plus nation equals paradise or price. [Outro] State's an institution, nation's a dream, print and the factory stitched the seam, some say ancient, some say designed, Wilson's self-rule rewired the map and the mind, say it once more so it sticks to the bone: state needs a border, nation needs a home.
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