We Don't Need Another Hero (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome)

The guitar enters like a warning before the beat establishes its mid-tempo swagger, and Tina Turner's voice arrives the way she always arrived — as someone who had already survived everything the song was about to describe. The production has a wide-open quality appropriate to its cinematic origins, synthesizers and drums creating a soundscape that feels simultaneously post-apocalyptic and strangely hopeful. The lyric poses a question that the song itself refuses to answer directly — about what kind of hero a broken world requires, and whether the old models of salvation still apply. Turner sings with a weariness that coexists with defiance, which is more complicated and more interesting than simple triumph would be. This was part of the mid-eighties moment when female rock vocalists were reclaiming territory that had been coded as masculine, and Turner in particular was doing it with the added authority of someone who had genuinely lived through disaster. It belongs on a long drive through somewhere empty and wide, when you are thinking about what you are building toward and what you have finally agreed to leave behind.