Twenty-Five Years After 9/11, “Superman” Still Shows How a Song Can Become Bigger Than Its Writer Intended

Some songs arrive with a purpose. Others acquire one later. Five for Fighting’s “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” belongs to the second category. Released before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the song was written from the perspective of a weary superhero, a figure powerful enough to save people and human enough to feel the cost.

After the attacks, America heard it differently. Television montages, memorial services and radio playlists used “Superman” alongside songs such as “Hero” and P.O.D.’s “Alive” to create an improvised language for grief. Twenty-five years later, the association remains difficult to separate from the music itself.

That transformation says something important about the way culture uses songs in moments of trauma. People rarely have the language they need when history breaks open. Music supplies borrowed words. A line written about one kind of exhaustion suddenly becomes a way of thinking about firefighters, families, first responders and ordinary people trying to comprehend an impossible week.

Christian culture understands this instinct well because songs have always carried communal memory. Hymns outlive the circumstances that produced them. Gospel songs migrate from churches into funerals and protests. Worship choruses become attached to hospital rooms, weddings and seasons of private grief that the songwriter could never have anticipated.

The spiritual dimension of “Superman” is not explicit, and that may be precisely why the song became so useful. It made room for vulnerability at a moment when the public mythology of heroism threatened to flatten actual human beings into symbols. The song’s central idea was that strength does not eliminate fragility.

That is a profoundly human truth and, for Christians, a familiar theological one. Power and suffering are not necessarily opposites. Courage can coexist with fear. The people who carry others can still need to be carried. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans needed permission to imagine heroes that way.

Anniversaries can turn memory into ceremony, but music often keeps memory personal. One chord can collapse decades. A song that was never intended to narrate a national tragedy can still return people to the emotional atmosphere of that time. “Superman” became part of that archive, not because a marketing campaign decided it should, but because millions of listeners found themselves inside it.