We don't need another hero
We don't need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
(Tina Turner, "We Don't Need Another Hero")
As a folklorist and a folk historian, I've found myself often in the role of folk anthropologist. While I definitely have a "niche" of people who respect what folk music is as an art form, the general responses I get when I tell people of my avocation are an assortment of screwed up faces and a comment or two analogizing the music to some backwoods hillbilly derivation sounding suspiciously like the emanations of a constipated bovine.
But folk music and folk tales are so much more, and so relevant to every culture, including our own. In judeo-christian tradition, folk music first came on the scene from the Israelites immediately after the Red Sea crossing, and folk tales began when people did. It was a long time from the creation of the planet until the first etchings of the Bible appeared as the end product of a nomadic adopted Egyptian made Moses, and in those years, the culture was largely an oral tradition, not a written one.
And there is a beauty and fluidity in an oral tradition. No tale ever comes out the same, and the perfectionists among us can continue revising on the fly rather than settle for a final, written work that feels all too much like a contract, and has the same stale, bureaucratic structure we generally loathe. But I digress...
As our cultures have changed, our folk heroes have changed. When the biggest fear was the Philistine next door, we had Samson and David to protect us. The former could wipe out legions with the jawbone of an ass, and the latter needed only a few river rocks to fell the mightiest man alive.
When multitudes suffered under the feudal system of Europe, we had Robin Hood lurking in the trees ready to pounce on the unsuspecting millionaire travelling below. Robin Hood has enjoyed many reincarnations, including "Pretty Boy Floyd" in the 30's, and still lives to some extent in the works of several rap artists, which is a key reason why I have not altogether discarded that specific style of music.
When the land was unsettled and we needed mighty men to perform the task, we had Paul Bunyan. We had Pecos Bill. These people settled the land and gave hope to the settlers that they hadn't come that far just to be cougar bait.
The tall tales then became the superheroes of the twentieth century. The world changed, and industrialization led to increased urbanization. No longer were the ploughboys or the lumberjack adequate to save us, because a brave new world meant a brave new menace, and a need for superheroes capable of fighting the menace. Of course, this led to one of this nation's most prominent illegal aliens, a guy by the name of Clark Kent, who embodied the ideal in such a way as to make him the standard by which all other superheroes are judged.
And of course, our music was not immune to all of this, but rather, it REFLECTED it. Music has always been the most potent way a soul can express itself (which is why I disdain pop music. It's a bastardization of an art form, and it almost mocks the beauty of the truly meaningful music). Where our brave knights went, our travelling minstrels followed (yes, yes, I MEANT to convey the Monty Python image here!). The deeds that our heroes did, they brought into our living room.
One of the problems that our American culture has is that we seem to have forgotten that. We NEED heroes; we NEED hope to fight the evil menace. We don't need to sanitize our movies for political correctness and make a fictional villain; we need to make caricatures of the ones that are already there, as well as caricatures of the heroes who fight them. Because when a hero's on the scene, we can all sleep a little easier at night.