As a culture, we are obsessed with the concept of heroes. It seems like you can't turn on a tv without a superhero movie either playing somewhere, or a commercial for the next one filling the ad break. Theaters are filled with the latest exploits of groups of progressively lamer and more forgettable 'heroes' saving us from imagined perils specifically engineered so only the people wearing those specific ridiculous costumes could stop hell on earth from starting. It's all a bit much after you've seen in a few times, isn't it?
We extend this notion into our lives, often calling an actor, an author, or a musician we like a 'hero' of ours, even when such terms shouldn't apply in the slightest. If we are not engaged in the same activity, exactly what we are looking up to is a bit difficult to put our finger on. There is a chasm between liking what someone does and considering them a personal inspiration. I'm afraid we have lost all sense of what words mean, and apply them so liberally they have become nothing more than artificial decorations we throw on people, like the fool's gold and costume jewelry you can get out of a claw machine at a bowling alley. (I'm always rather annoyed when I see a headline about a 'star' of this or that who was merely a supporting player, or how I once received a press release about a 'legendary' band who had one hit single and only two albums to their name. Ugh.)
The other aspect of having a personal 'hero' is the fact we don't truly know these people beyond their works, so we may not like the people themselves who gave rise to the art we so admire. You've probably heard it mentioned as common wisdom to "never meet your heroes", and that's precisely why. How many Harry Potter fans dedicated so much of their youth to the books and movies created by someone who now reveals themselves to be consumed by hate for people who simply want to live their lives in peace? For all we know, there are so many more people we supposedly admire who fall into similar traps.
That is to say that I don't buy into the idea of having personal heroes. It is both natural and acceptable to have inspirations, to admire the artistic work of people whose creative voice has matched our own and/or taught us things about ourselves, but putting them on a pedestal as something more is a dangerous tactic.
Now that I have given up on my own artistic ventures, I can see this more clearly than ever before. As an author, I never had anyone who guided my way. I backed my way into writing, so I had not looked at any particular style or writer as a model for what I wanted to do. My voice evolved as my own, simply because I was not reading a lot of other work looking for bits and pieces I could bring into what I was doing. It helped that my ideas were few and far between, so even if I had something in mind I wanted to try, it would fade away or morph into something of my own devising by the time I was ready to write it.
As a musician, things were different. There is one writer who meant more to me than any other, whose work was always in the back of my mind as I wrote my own songs, who I would have been tempted to elevate to a higher status. That person, unsurprising to anyone who has read almost anything I have written over the years, is Jim Steinman.
His music was the first that spoke to me and pulled me into the world of fandom, and it is his that still resonates with me more than any other all these years later. I have said on many occasions I feel that I can trace a good portion of my personality to his sarcasm and futile melodrama. Like in his songs, my own thoughts are centered on the idea of dreams and hopes that never quite come true, and the raging at the gods that comes from asking why I seem fated to suffer without knowing what any of the pleasures of life will ever feel like.
Those thoughts might drive my thinking, but they don't necessarily come through in my writing. I took the over-the-top nature of Steinman's writing, and put a more poetic spin on it. This might have been to couch those thoughts and feelings enough that no one else quite got to the point of what I was trying to say, or it might have been that I felt I needed to say things with pretty turns of phrase to cover up that what I had to say wasn't interesting or important enough to listen to. If you're going to say nothing, at least say it in a way people will remember. I think Steinman would like that line.
As I wrote more and more songs, I would start to let my guard down, and more puns and snarky wordplay would start to creep into the lyrics. I was particularly fond of one song that played off the phrase 'manifest destiny' as a way of talking about issues regarding fate. Steinman had directly referenced The Three Stooges, so I felt well within my rights to be a bit of a jerk in that case. I wrote about jealousy being a 'green-eyed monster' that stands in 'the limelight', which still brings a wry smile to my face.
My most direct homage was writing a song titled "I Can See You When I Close My Eyes (But Not A Second Before)", which is a title that not only played into his penchant for contradictions, but into the idea that what we want may only be possible in our own minds. It fits the theme when Steinman wrote about how "we see what we want to see" when "It's All Coming Back To Me". An intentional nod, although my version of the song was far less horny. Likewise, my version of the ending of "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" was not soaked in as many souring hormones. While he wrote "I'm praying for the end of time, so I can end my time with you", I phrased mine as the more demure "I love you to death, but after that we'll see".
All of this is to say that while Steinman is undoubtedly a musical inspiration of mine (despite me never learning to play piano), and his influence is felt in my work, I do not consider him to be a 'hero' of mine. His life was kept private enough I don't feel as if I have ever known enough about him to make any judgment about whether or not I would like him, and a few stories that have been told in certain circles paint an unflattering picture. This seems to be a case of it being better to see someone as we want to see them, as is useful to see them, rather than as they actually were.
That's not a bad thing, by the way. In existential philosophy, the world is as we experience it. Our truth is filtered through our senses, and the way reality is interpreted by our minds and emotions. When someone enters our life and is able to be the mortar filling some of the cracks in our souls, we don't need to look any further than that. They have served an important purpose, and it would be foolish on our part to give up on that because of a need to dig where the dirt needs not be disturbed.
Hero worship is unhealthy not because we shouldn't look up to people who have brought good into our lives, but because it leads us to thinking some people aren't as flawed as the rest of us. It's important to remember that everyone who helps us get through to the next existential crisis has likely faced the same demons and had people of their own to help them through. We are merely a knot on a line that stretches as far back into the past as human lineage does. We are not alone, nor are we unique, despite how much either can feel true at times.
What makes these people feel like heroes to us is that they are always there for us, while the actual people in our lives are not. Mere presence can seem heroic when faced with the realities of fractured attention and everyone else dealing with as much as we are. We turn to art because it can mirror our emotions, it can calm our nerves, and it can tell us things that are hard to put into words.
Some of us are used to being disappointed by the people in our lives. Sometimes it's family that not only acts as if you're dead to them, but can't even remember that they're the ones who severed the ties. Sometimes it's friends who will take weeks to respond to your honesty, which creates a cognitive dissonance between their claims and actions. Sometimes it's people who completely disappear from your life with no warning or explanation, even after you told them about your issues with people having done that before.
There are not always many people we can count on to be there for us when we need someone to listen, someone to remind us that feeling in the shadows means there has to be a light somewhere, someone who remembers the good things about us when we can't see them for ourselves. These last couple of years have been revealing in this respect, which has made me more insular, more withdrawn. That has pushed me closer to music, but only the music that has always been with me.
Jim Steinman's music has been the one constant in my life. For these thirty-plus years, I could always pull a CD (ok, I started with cassettes, I'm old enough to say) off the shelf when everything felt too much. Steinman's music felt like hearing a kindred spirit, the only person I knew who saw the world in many of the same ways I did. Now that I realize my mind probably isn't exactly normal, it makes all the sense in the world that I would hold dear to the one voice that sounded like my own.
I often have feelings of being rather alone in my experience of this world. Those songs give me reason to think maybe I'm not irredeemably broken.
As Steinman wrote, "When you really-really need it the most, that's when rock and roll dreams come through."
What's more heroic than that?
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