A note on the title

The title is taken from the Jim Steinman song of the same name, performed by Bonnie Tyler, one of the biggest international hits of 1984.

Here are the lyrics, essentially a series of rhetorical questions that serve to identify lack and a series of statements and demands addressing need. The song, a typically overblown (and fabulous) piece of Wagnerian HI-NRG bombast from the outré Steinman, conflates a night’s disappointing sex, in which Tyler’s lover fails to rise to the challenge and during which she urges him on, hoping against hope that he can fulfil her, with a broader question about the state of a fallen world in which all the mythical fantasies have disappeared and the population is left bereft.

Where have all the good men gone and where are all the Gods?

Where’s the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?

Isn’t there a white knight upon a fiery steed?

Late at night I toss and turn and dream of what I need

I need a hero.

I’m holding out for a hero till the end of the night
 

And he’s gotta be strong
 

And he’s gotta be fast
 

And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight

I need a hero. I'm holding out for a hero till the morning light

He’s gotta be sure and it's gotta be soon and he’s gotta be larger than life

(italics mine)

 

 

It's interesting to contrast this with an earlier reflection on the loss of the hero, British Punk band The Stranglers' 1977 hit No More Heroes, a song whose ambiguous/ambivalent title/chorus suggest either a simple observation, i.e. that we live in a world without heroes, or a democratic demand that no more heroes should be allowed to exist, that there must be a great levelling. The song names a number of real historical figures and wonders about their demise.

The Stranglers are essentially facing forward into a world without heroes. “Whatever happened to?” has many different connotations, wistful, offhand, even dismissive, but it doesn't sound nostalgic and this is central to the song's ambivalence, as is Hugh Cornwell's uninflected delivery of the line, whereas with Steinman's, flamboyant, almost hysterical work that absence is figured as a loss, and a fundamental loss at that.
 

Heroes and heroism, the heroic dimensions or everyday life and ordinary people will become an increasingly important theme in popular culture and popular self-conception all through the 80s and 90s, as will the notion of surviving or in some senses being a survivor (on which see Christopher Lasch's The Minimal Self)