1985: Tina Turner, “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)”

By Jason Fitzroy Jeffers

Out of  the  ruins Out from the wreckage

Can't make the same mistake this time We are the children, the last generation We are the ones they left behind

There was nothing I wanted more as a child in the ‘80s than to save the world. I don’t know if it was the steady diet of comic books or incessant television footage of starving children in Ethiopia that stirred my heart to this calling. There was only one problem: the rest of the world didn’t know I existed. I grew up in Barbados, an island so small it didn’t appear on many of the maps and globes we studied in school. As a citizen of the so-called “third world,” this gave me a sense that the only things worth getting worked up about happened on the other side of the horizon. From Michael Jackson to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Challenger shuttle explosion to The Cosby Show, everything important happened “over there.” How then, could I ever be a hero?

We lived in an independent nation, we were told. Once Britain’s favorite colony and sometimes still referred to as “Little England”, we’d wrestled—or were granted, depending on who you ask—our statehood in 1966. The years following were a valiant and mostly successful experiment in nationhood, an attempt to break with the past. Yet in 1985, when I was five years old, I remember being marched out onto the sidewalk in front of our school clutching tiny crayon-colored UK and Barbadian flags. Once there, my schoolmates and I flanked the roadway in either direction as far as my eyes could see, waiting for a signal in the punishing morning sun.

After standing for what felt like hours, the signal came with our teacher’s cry: “Alright now, wave!”

In unison, we held those flags aloft and waved furiously as Queen Elizabeth II’s motorcade crawled by on her visit to her former island, which had remained part of the Commonwealth. We’d never done this for our Prime Minister. Across the street, other black bastard children of empire from the neighboring school were waving their flags as well, blinking away the sweat in their eyes. As much as the memory stings, I was probably over all the fuss by lunchtime, running around and pretending to be a superhero. We wore school uniforms, a colonial hangover. We boys used to unbutton our crisp, white collared shirts and run as fast as we could so they would flap behind us like capes.

The 1980s certainly wasn’t short on heroes inviting our worship. From Rambo to cowboy Reagan, a young boy had more than enough to suggest he could and should be the center of the world, one waiting on him to save it. During this decade we were treated to box office-conquering renditions of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, a mythopoetic narrative structure that is the backbone of everything from medieval tales of gallant knights to the intergalactic swashbuckling of Star Wars. It glorified the masculine drive to surge beyond the limits of home, unleashing the secret powers hidden deep within, powers that could set the darkening world to rights. To paraphrase John Lennon, a hero was something to be.

In 1985, on my little island, the heroes in almost every movie, book, cartoon and comic we obsessed over were white men. I remember one night tearfully asking my mother why my hair wasn’t straight. I’d been playing superheroes outside again and wanted my hair to blow in the wind like He-Man’s did when he battled his arch-nemesis Skeletor; my curls just stood there, inert. I truly may not have considered my Blackness until my mother explained it to me that night. The songs of Bob Marley would soon become  hymns  to  me—that  story’s  deserving  of  a book, not an essay—and although I was way too young to make proper sense of it all, I started to uncomfortably consider that  maybe  all  I’d  worshipped  until  now was somehow tainted.

Then came Tina Turner’s “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)”.

The song was released in 1985, the same year of the Queen’s visit and around the time of my He-Man-hair meltdown. I remember its operatic bombast and yearning sax filling the car on the way to school. At first, I was perplexed. Why was Ms. Turner saying we didn’t need heroes? Then, this is the greatest song of all time! I had no idea why I felt this, but I was sure of it. It soared on the wings of a strange truth that I couldn’t decode but genuflected to anyway.

People around the world certainly loved it. It was the centerpiece from the soundtrack of one of the most hyped films of the summer, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which sent it surging up the  Billboard  Hot  100  charts  where  it peaked at #2. Boosted by a music video that saw Turner rocking out in the desert with shocking platinum hair and post-apocalyptic supervillain couture—she played the film’s baddie, Aunty Entity—it was a victory lap for the singer. After a decade lost in the pop wilderness, she had triumphantly re-emerged the year before with her comeback album “Private Dancer”. She was everywhere, and now, so was “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)”. It was firmly of the moment, and yet, to my awed and bewildered five-year-old ears, it sounded like the future.

I was right.

Looking for something we can rely on There's got to be something better out there. Love and compassion, their day is coming

All else are castles built in the air

On its surface, “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” is about a yearning for freedom beyond the ragged dystopia the titular hero confronts in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. In  the  film’s  universe,  nuclear  disaster  has  devastated  all we know of modern society, and the world is quite literally a desert. In Bartertown, one of the few remaining outposts of humanity,  Mel  Gibson’s  Max  confronts Turner’s sinister villain who brutally lords over the town’s citizens. After being exiled from Bartertown, Max discovers a band  of  lost  children  in  the  desert  who recognize him as a messiah come to lead them to the promised land. With Turner’s tyranny the only thing standing in their way, Max reluctantly fights for the children and saves the day.

Thunderdrome is at once the most ambitious, and the weakest of the ‘80s Mad Max trilogy. Though pretty enjoyable and suffused with visual iconography that is now shorthand for the apocalypse—not to mention riffed on in music videos from 2Pac and Dr. Dre’s “California Love” to Jay-Z, Rihanna and Kanye West’s “Run This Town”—its plot and characters strain to fulfill the themes the story tugs at.

Turner’s song, on the other hand, more than reaches the spirit the film strains to summon, far exceeding its remit as spunky soundtrack to an okay movie.

“We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” is not often held up as one of Turner’s best songs, but with a recent hit Broadway musical about her life and a new HBO documentary covering  the  same  biographical  terrain,  I’m  hoping  the track gets a little more love than I alone can give it at my karaoke sessions. More importantly, the song somehow speaks to the turbulent moment we now find ourselves in. Having narrowly escaped the “leader of the free world” setting off a nuclear binge via Twitter and currently staring down the possible end of the global COVID-19 pandemic that has claimed almost 3 Million lives worldwide, the fictional wasteland Turner sings of escaping feels all too real.

Sadly, however, we are not in the clear. If anything, the song calls for us to be vigilant and visionary, not to celebrate some return to normal, because what is that anyway? When Credit Suisse and World  Bank  officials  report  alarming  growth  in the worldwide income inequality gap, suggesting increasing food insecurity, freshwater crises and armed violence to come; when a growing number of Americans conspiratorially believe that one of their political parties is run by child-eating lizard-vampires in disguise; when systemic racism and police brutality have led to sprawling protests and violent backlash teasing nothing less than a race war; and when global warming is destroying weather patterns, resulting in gargantuan, city-devouring fires in California and monstrous state-sized hurricanes in Florida, the “Thunderdome” that Turner sings about finding life beyond might as well be the unsustainable and inequitable world order we somehow came to regard as normal before the pandemic, a state of affairs we’re rushing back to for comfort.

“We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” begs us not to. As Tina sings, “there’s got to be something better out there.”

If anything, the only way out is through. The word ‘apocalypse’ has been thrown around a lot the last few years, but it’s worth remembering that it’s derived from the Greek apokalupsis, and does not translate to “the end” so much as an “uncovering” or “revelation.” Recent times have certainly been that: from the police to our government, free-market capitalism to the patriarchal, heteronormative family, these “castles built in the air” that  Turner  sings  about  were  supposed  to save us. Instead, these pillars—our heroes—are devouring us.

And I wonder when we are ever gonna change? Living under the fear, till nothing else remains.

We don’t need another hero

We don’t need to know the way home All we want is life beyond the Thunderdome

Consider that Turner, not long before the song’s release, had just re-emerged from an apocalypse of her own. Born in Nut Bush, Tennessee in 1939 as Anna Mae Bullock, she grew up under the spectre of Jim Crow racism. In the 1960s, she was the star of the R&B act The Ike and Tina Turner Revue, whose propulsive hits such as “Proud Mary” and “River Deep - Mountain High”, blazed a trail that Rock n’ Roll soon followed; indeed, Turner claimed that no less than Mick Jagger stole her moves. With all that frenzied, ecstatic dancing and banshee wails that drew on her adolescence as a holy roller in the Pentecostal church, Tina was far more incendiary than other soul singers of the time. She herself was a flame, one which bandmate and husband Ike tried to snuff out through unrelenting physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

You surely know the story. After one particularly savage beating, Turner left Ike and the band with only 36 cents and a gas-station credit card to call her own. She later negotiated to keep her stage name, but her solo career floundered. It would take years singing in lounges and rundown venues before her embrace of Buddhism, a turn to pop, and a canvassing of the European music landscape led to a hit album and global pop domination. To this day, the Guinness Book of World Records lists her as having sold more concert tickets than any other solo performer in  music history.

From 1960 until now, if the zeitgeist ever knew a phoenix, it’s Tina Turner. What’s more, her lifelong battles against the intertwined fuckeries of racism and sexism put her personal actualization in alignment with Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and every system-and-statue toppling movement of the last few years. I can’t claim to know Turner’s personal politics, but I can find inspiration in how she re-embodied herself as the Black Divine Feminine given form, reclaiming her time and parity from those who had savaged her and hers. She didn’t need another hero because she became her own.

I know the shit sounds absurd, but when I hear “We Don’t Need Another Hero” now? I hear a call to envision nothing less than a new world, a schmaltzy pop distillation of the truths of Black feminism, the ultimate liberation movement in the face of apocalyptic devastation. The Combahee River  Collective,  a  ‘70s  Black  lesbian feminist organization outlined this inescapable truth in their founding statement, writing: “if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” For all its pomp, spectacle and sci-fi  flair,  “We  Don’t  Need  Another Hero (Thunderdome)” embodies the search for this  all-encompassing  freedom beyond every conceivable oppression, the possibility of  an  existence  where  all villains have been vanquished and the heroes  from  general  casting  (i.e.  -  white, thin, able-bodied, straight, middle class) aren’t needed to save (or pretend to save) anyone. An existence in which we’ve accepted that in many instances, our heroes and villains have been one and the same.

None of this crossed the mind of five-year-old postcolonial me, catching sax-fueled spasms in the car on the way to school much to the alarm of my poor mother. Yet, growing up in a nation working to establish itself in the ashes of empire, I somehow instinctively recognized the song as a siren call articulating what my country people were reflexively reaching for, a vision which many of us are still striving to make real. For me, it’s a grounded utopia we have to hold in focus now: a place beyond the imperialism of Thunderdome—and the U.S. and the UK—where BIPOC, LGBTQ people and those with disabilities are no longer grist for the mill of late-stage capitalism. Where the revelations of COVID-19 and the Trump years compel us not to return to business as usual, but to divest from the fucked up ecocidal normal we’ve known. Where heroes are no longer needed because we’ve realized all we truly need is each other.

I hear all of these things in “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)”. I actually hear them a little more every day. As things around us increasingly resemble something out of a Mad Max movie, maybe we all need to start asking ourselves one question: “What would Tina do?”

Jason Fitzroy Jeffers is a filmmaker from Barbados who has produced award-winning short films such as Papa Machete and T that have screened at festivals such as Sundance, BlackStar, and Berlinale. He is also co-executive director of Third Horizon, a creative collective that stages the annual Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami, a showcase of cinema from the Caribbean, its diaspora, and the Global South. For more information, please visit:

jasonfitzroy.com

thirdhorizon.net