How the State Department wants to use music to change the world.

News Snapshot:

It was three months ago—though it feels like three years—when Secretary of State Antony Blinken strapped on a Fender Stratocaster, stepped to a mic in the State Department’s august Benjamin Franklin Room, and led a band of musician-friends through a more-than-passable cover of Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man.” Blinken was kicking off the Global Music Diplomacy Initiative, which, as he put it to the festive crowd of officials and artists, aimed to leverage the power of music to “transcend the borders of geography and … language” and to “foster collaboration between America and people around the world.” He had no...