Song #19: "Hero" by Mariah Carey

 

One Song a Day #19: Mariah Carey — “Hero”

🎵 Today’s Song

Mariah Carey — “Hero”
1993

Random draw: #19
Selected era bucket: 1990–1999
Verified remaining eligible population: 9,056
Selection method: Era bucket selected with equal probability, then one remaining eligible recording selected uniformly from that bucket.

Chart performance

Overall pop peak: #1
Billboard Hot 100: #1 for 4 weeks
Mainstream Top 40: #1
Adult Contemporary: #2
Billboard R&B: #5
UK Singles Chart: #7

Yearly rank: #6
Weeks charted: 30
Weeks Top 20: 21
Weeks Top 10: 16
Weeks at peak: 4

Mariah Carey at this point

Charting record: 10th of 44
Top-20 hit: 10th of 30
Top-10 hit: 10th of 26
#1 pop hit: 8th of 19

Previous Top-20 hit: “Dreamlover”
Next Top-20 hit: “Without You”

Retrospective standing

GOAT overall: #481
Among Mariah Carey songs: 9th of 33
Among Mariah Carey Top-20 hits: 9th of 25
GOAT points: 735,260

Hot 100 portion of chart run: Entire 30-week run

Record details

Entered chart: October 23, 1993
Released: October 18, 1993
Recorded: 1992
Single: “Hero” / “Everything Fades Away”
Album: Music Box
Songwriters: Mariah Carey, Walter Afanasieff
Lead vocal: Mariah Carey
Running time: 4:17
Label: Columbia
Catalog number: 38-77224
Recording to use: Original 1993 Music Box recording

Listen / watch / read

Listen: Original 1993 recording
Watch: Official “Hero” video
Read: Lyrics; Mariah Carey's 2018 Pitchfork interview

Versions & title history

Original or cover: Original composition and recording
Other versions: Spanish-language “Héroe”; 2009 re-recording; numerous live versions
Later charting version: “Never Too Far/Hero Medley” reached #81 in 2001
Same-title unrelated chart hits: Includes Enrique Iglesias' unrelated “Hero,” a #3 hit in 2001
Streaming note: Use the original 1993 recording for this project

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I knew “Hero” before I played it today. Very well, as it turned out.

I didn't realize quite how well until the first few seconds. The song begins with an eight-note piano figure that essentially previews the chorus melody, and I knew what was coming immediately. There was no waiting for Mariah Carey to start singing. Eight notes were enough.

That familiarity presents a problem for this project, though.

Mariah Carey has had so many enormous hits that it would be very easy to write the same post about her six or seven times. We could talk about the voice, her extraordinary early chart run, Tommy Mottola, Columbia Records and her longevity. Then I could save the draft, change the song title the next time the randomizer lands on Mariah Carey, and do most of it again.

So the more useful question today was: What is specifically interesting about “Hero”?

As it turns out, quite a bit.

Eight #1s in ten tries

We need a little Mariah Carey context, because the numbers entering “Hero” are ridiculous.

“Hero” was Carey's tenth charting single. Her first ten Hot 100 hits peaked at #1, #1, #1, #1, #1, #2, #5, #1, #1 and #1.

That's eight #1 singles among her first ten chart records. All ten reached the Top 5.

And this happened quickly. “Vision of Love” reached #1 in the summer of 1990. “Hero” reached #1 in December 1993. In roughly three and a half years, Carey had accumulated eight #1 singles.

She wasn't finished. Today she has 19, one behind the Beatles and more than any other solo artist.

There's another part of Carey's career that's easier to overlook. I have always thought of her primarily as a singer, and I suspect I'm not alone. The Voice is such an overwhelming part of the Mariah Carey image that her songwriting can become secondary.

It shouldn't.

Carey has a songwriting credit on 18 of her 19 #1 singles. The exception is her cover of the Jackson 5's “I'll Be There.” She was eventually inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

That matters today because “Hero” is, before anything else, an interesting Mariah Carey songwriting story.

The Mariah Carey song that wasn't supposed to be a Mariah Carey song

“Hero” wasn't originally written for Mariah Carey. It was supposed to be a song for Gloria Estefan to sing in the 1992 Dustin Hoffman movie Hero.

The assignment reached Carey through two people already central to her career. Walter Afanasieff, her frequent collaborator, was involved in writing and producing a song for the film, while Tommy Mottola—Carey's label boss and, by then, her husband—asked whether she wanted to help write something for Estefan. Carey agreed, and she and Afanasieff began working on what became “Hero.”

That apparently changed the way Carey approached the song. She wasn't writing something she expected to sing herself, so she wasn't asking whether it sounded like Mariah Carey.

“I think I wouldn't have written that song for myself,” she later told Pitchfork.

That's fascinating in retrospect.

Carey is overwhelmingly an artist-songwriter rather than a songwriter-for-hire. She has written or co-written an extraordinary number of her own hits, but she doesn't have some hidden Diane Warren-style second career supplying dozens of giant songs to other artists.

For a brief moment, though, she was writing outside herself.

And apparently what Mariah Carey writes when she isn't trying to write a Mariah Carey song is “Hero.”

Mottola heard what Carey and Afanasieff were working on and thought they were crazy to give it away. He pushed Carey to keep it. The song was reworked for her, while the movie ultimately went in another direction.

Which gives us one of the stranger details in the story:

“Hero” exists because of the movie Hero, but “Hero” isn't in Hero.

The movie instead used Luther Vandross' “Heart of a Hero.”

The problem Mariah had with “Hero”

Carey didn't immediately love what she'd written.

Years later, she remembered her reaction pretty bluntly: “Ugh, this song is so schmaltzy.”

I'll let Mariah use “schmaltzy.”

I'd call the song unabashedly sentimental.

There isn't much ambiguity in “Hero.” If you're struggling, frightened or alone, the answer is within you. The first verse establishes that almost immediately. The chorus initially talks about a hero arriving, but then turns the idea inward: the hero isn't somebody coming to rescue you. It's you.

It's less a plot twist than a rhetorical turn, because the verse has already told us where this is going.

And then the song keeps finding different ways to tell us essentially the same thing.

That actually impressed me after several listens. There isn't much development in the argument. The second verse is still telling you to search within yourself. The bridge tells you to hang on. The final chorus returns to the same conclusion.

But Carey gets a surprising amount of mileage out of one idea without making the song feel as repetitive as it actually is.

More importantly, the lack of specificity turns out to be useful.

There is no particular breakup, death, failure, illness, family problem or crisis in “Hero.” The listener supplies the problem.

That can make the writing seem generic.

It also makes the song extraordinarily portable.

The 13-year-old who needs it

That portability wasn't entirely accidental.

Carey has talked about thinking specifically about young people when writing “Hero”—kids who don't have somebody encouraging them, whose dreams are being knocked down and who need to find strength within themselves. Later, she got remarkably specific about remembering what it feels like to be around 13 years old, in junior high, and convinced that you don't fit in.

That makes perfect sense to me.

Before finding those comments, I had already described “Hero” as sounding like something aimed straight at a middle-school girl having the worst week of her life.

Adolescence provides an almost inexhaustible supply of crises that feel enormous when you're living through them. And “Hero” never tells you that your particular crisis isn't important enough. Whatever is making you miserable fits inside the song.

I never had that relationship with “Hero.”

That's going to matter later.

Mariah could have absolutely murdered this thing

There is another reason “Hero” works better than its ingredients suggest it should.

Mariah Carey exercises restraint.

That's not the first word most people associate with one of the most technically gifted pop singers of her generation, but it's what I kept noticing today. She sings “Hero” extremely well, obviously, but this isn't four minutes of vocal gymnastics. She doesn't spend the record constantly reminding us that she can do things almost nobody else can do.

It turns out that was deliberate.

Afanasieff later described having different vocal performances available. One was simpler. Another had Carey singing out more and adding more licks. They chose something between them because, as he put it, “The song really calls for not anything really fancy.”

That's exactly what I was hearing.

Carey has enough vocal firepower to overwhelm this material. Instead, she pulls back.

The arrangement follows the same general arc. The record grows larger as it proceeds, reaches its biggest emotional moment around the third chorus, and then settles back down rather than ending with one final display of vocal pyrotechnics.

And here's something I didn't expect to say about a Mariah Carey record:

“Hero” seems like a perfectly achievable karaoke song for a reasonably good singer.

That's not criticism. Quite a lot of the Mariah Carey catalog strikes me as karaoke no-go territory. You can technically select the song, but then you're volunteering to be compared with Mariah Carey doing Mariah Carey things.

“Hero” doesn't demand that.

A song built for occasions

Contemporary critics immediately understood what kind of song this was. Billboard predicted that “Hero” would be heard for years, while Cash Box went further, suggesting that its universal message made it destined for charity fundraisers, proms and even advertising.

That turned out to be remarkably accurate.

Carey repeatedly brought “Hero” out when an occasion called for inspiration: a 1996 memorial for fallen police officers, humanitarian benefits, America: A Tribute to Heroes after 9/11, Michael Jordan's final NBA All-Star Game, Live 8 and Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural festivities.

The song's lack of specificity made all of those uses possible. It was originally addressed inward—the hero you need is yourself—but its language was broad enough to work for almost any person, struggle or occasion that required the word hero.

And eventually even the solemnity became part of the joke.

In a 2015 Game of War commercial, “Hero” plays while Mariah Carey, wearing armor, shoots a dragon out of the sky with a giant crossbow.

Carey turns to the soldiers and says, “Time to be heroes, guys.”

That may have been my favorite discovery of the day.

Appreciating Mariah more than I like Mariah

I checked my music favorites today and discovered something surprising: I have exactly zero Mariah Carey songs in them.

That sounds more negative than I mean it.

I also can't think of a Mariah Carey song that would come on the radio and make me change the channel.

I think I appreciate Mariah Carey more than I like Mariah Carey.

She's obviously an extraordinary singer. Today's research reinforced something I've probably underrated for years: she's also a serious songwriter. And “Hero” is a particularly interesting example because she apparently had to stop thinking like Mariah Carey to write it.

I also think the finished record is better than the ingredients make it sound. Take a universal self-esteem message, wrap it in an enormous early-'90s adult-contemporary ballad and aim some of it at unhappy 13-year-olds, and there are plenty of ways to make something I would find unbearable.

Carey and Afanasieff don't.

The production is restrained enough. More importantly, Carey is restrained enough. She sings beautifully without treating every measure as an opportunity to demonstrate what Mariah Carey can do.

But none of that makes me love “Hero.”

I've heard it probably five to seven times today. It's fine. I don't dislike it. If it came on somewhere, I wouldn't be reaching for the button.

I'm also not going to seek it out.

Maybe part of that is simply timing. “Hero” never found me at a moment when I needed somebody to tell me that the strength I needed was already inside me. For someone who heard it at 13, while feeling completely alone or convinced that the world was collapsing around them, I can easily understand how this could become one of the most important songs in their life.

For me, it mostly becomes background music.

And that's okay.

The randomizer isn't asking whether “Hero” deserves to be famous. It obviously does. It isn't asking whether Mariah Carey is talented. She obviously is. It isn't even asking whether the song has had a remarkable cultural life. After today, I think that story is considerably more interesting than I did this morning.

It's asking how much I like the record.

53/100.

That feels almost sacrilegious for a four-week #1 by one of the most successful artists in chart history.

But 53 is where I land.

“Hero” is a record I respect considerably more than I enjoy—and after spending a day figuring out exactly why it works, I'm perfectly comfortable with that.