In September of 2001, I was glued to NPR, trying to understand the suddenly-changed world by organizing information in my head while my fingers clacked at my data-entry job. I avoided demonstrations of unity or communal emotion; I would not consciously hear "Hero" for another decade. (The songs I did hear intercut with 9/11 audio on the radio throughout that fall and winter were U2's "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" and, bizarrely, Bad Company's "Seagull".) I'm not sure I even knew that Enrique Iglesias had a hit around this time: the early 2000s was the nadir of my engagement with current pop. My attention had drifted to the past, enabled by Napster and a succession of similar services.
But though I missed the most obvious and schlockiest expression of the sudden pop-cultural boom of pseudo-admiration for "heroism" -- focusing first on the responders of that Tuesday, police and firefighters and EMTs, and before long the soldiers making the hard lives of Afghan villagers even harder -- the narrative itself was impossible to miss. Brightly-colored spandex-spangled figures leapt into movie screens in order to both metaphorize and overliteralize the story America told itself about the "bad guys" who had hurt us and who therefore justified the use of extraordinary force in defense of a lost innocence, a sluggish economy, a burst bubble. It seemed that everything I had loved as a nerdy teen was pressed into the service of stories about 9/11, and I backed away from superheroes, hard rock, and Lord of the Rings as they were transformed, willingly or not, into metaphors for the West standing against an unreasoning evil, when more and more they all seemed to tell a single story about a bully taking a single stray hit as a pretext for pummeling the offender into pulp.
When, during the false comfort of the Obama years, I started trying to catch up on a bunch of what I'd missed, I finally heard (and watched) "Hero", it struck me how slender and unlikely a reed it was to hang a clash-of-civilizations narrative from. Iglesias' thin whine of a voice, the anonymous wallpaper of the production, the narcissistic lyrics promising comfort while acting out a bottomless well of neediness: if this was what America chose to portray its state-sanctioned heroes as saying to America, it was no flattering portrait on either side. Joseph Kahn's music video is clearer-eyed: Mickey Rourke's (and the state's) readiness to commit violence is true power, not Iglesias' lip-quivering emotional appeals, and Iglesias dying in the rain while Jennifer Love Hewitt wails is a bleakly sardonic comment on the song's own promises.
There's not much daylight between the Spanish-language version of the song and the one familiar to the English-language pop audience: if anything, it's more narcissistic (and slightly hornier). But the delicate wimpiness of the production and Iglesias' spoilt hangdog performance are the same: a form of masculinity no less toxic for its all its extravagant performance of sensitivity.
But though I missed the most obvious and schlockiest expression of the sudden pop-cultural boom of pseudo-admiration for "heroism" -- focusing first on the responders of that Tuesday, police and firefighters and EMTs, and before long the soldiers making the hard lives of Afghan villagers even harder -- the narrative itself was impossible to miss. Brightly-colored spandex-spangled figures leapt into movie screens in order to both metaphorize and overliteralize the story America told itself about the "bad guys" who had hurt us and who therefore justified the use of extraordinary force in defense of a lost innocence, a sluggish economy, a burst bubble. It seemed that everything I had loved as a nerdy teen was pressed into the service of stories about 9/11, and I backed away from superheroes, hard rock, and Lord of the Rings as they were transformed, willingly or not, into metaphors for the West standing against an unreasoning evil, when more and more they all seemed to tell a single story about a bully taking a single stray hit as a pretext for pummeling the offender into pulp.
When, during the false comfort of the Obama years, I started trying to catch up on a bunch of what I'd missed, I finally heard (and watched) "Hero", it struck me how slender and unlikely a reed it was to hang a clash-of-civilizations narrative from. Iglesias' thin whine of a voice, the anonymous wallpaper of the production, the narcissistic lyrics promising comfort while acting out a bottomless well of neediness: if this was what America chose to portray its state-sanctioned heroes as saying to America, it was no flattering portrait on either side. Joseph Kahn's music video is clearer-eyed: Mickey Rourke's (and the state's) readiness to commit violence is true power, not Iglesias' lip-quivering emotional appeals, and Iglesias dying in the rain while Jennifer Love Hewitt wails is a bleakly sardonic comment on the song's own promises.
There's not much daylight between the Spanish-language version of the song and the one familiar to the English-language pop audience: if anything, it's more narcissistic (and slightly hornier). But the delicate wimpiness of the production and Iglesias' spoilt hangdog performance are the same: a form of masculinity no less toxic for its all its extravagant performance of sensitivity.
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