Songoftheday 1/13/23 -Would you dance if I asked you to dance? Would you run and never look back?

 

 

"Hero" - Enrique Iglesias

from the album Escape (2001)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #3 (three weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 26

 

Today's song comes from Enrique Iglesias, son of Julio (a "nepo-baby", if you will), who overshadowed his dad in the pop music world in 1999 with his fourth album, and first all in English, Enrique, which spun off two #1 hits with "Bailamos" and "Be With You" as well as another top-40 success with "Rhythm Divine". 

At the beginning of September, 2001, Enrique released the lead single to his next album, Escape. "Hero" was written by the singer with Paul Barry and producer Mark Taylor, the pair who penned all three of his previous pop hits. Unlike Mariah Carey's song of the same name, this is not inspirational, but rather a love (or rather a lust) song where he's serenading a prospective bedroom partner. There's a slew of questions, like "Would you tremble, if I touched your lips?" or "would you die for the one you loved?". The chorus has him exclaiming "I can be your hero, baby, I can take away your pain" without going into what pain he's talking about. Even so, he was working the Latin lover card hard, and the delivery matched that. But this was ten days before the terrorist attacks on 9/11. After this, when radio stations were deciding playlists based on fleeting title searches and themes on what to ban and what to play, they seemed to just take the "Hero" title, decide that it fit, and played the hell out of it. They even created those "9/11 edits" inserting audio news snippets within the record (like they did for Enya's "Only Time"). With that stroke of fate, Enrique broke the sophomore jinx quite handily. The music video for the song, made before the re-appropriation of the record, cast Iglesias as a bandit on the run with actress/singer Jennifer Love Hewitt that doesn't end well...With the lyrics so bland, the video is more interesting than the song anyway...

"Hero" became Enrique's third top ten pop hit in on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in November of 2001. On the radio, the song went to #2 on the Mainstream Top-40 airplay chart, and #12 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 radio list. But its biggest success was the on the "easy listening" format, where it topped the Adult Contemporary chart for fifteen weeks, staying 88 weeks on the list. The remixes of the song, done by Thunderpuss 2000 and Metro, helped it top the Dance Club Play chart for a week, his third time to the summit. Internationally, the single went to #1 in the United Kingdom, Spain, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Switzerland, Poland, Portugal, and Romania, while reaching the top ten in Italy (#2), The Netherlands (#2), Belgium (#2 Flanders/#19 Wallonia), Germany (#3), Austria (#3), Sweden (#3),  New Zealand (#3), Norway (#3), Denmark (#5), and Hungary (#5). The Escape album, released in October of that year, spent a week at #2 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, with over a year on the list (64 weeks), going on to sell over three million copies. Enrique and the album will return to the series.

(4/10)

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The Spanish-language version of the song, "Heroe", spent a week at #1 on the Latin Songs, Latin Airplay, and Latin Pop Airplay charts in Billboard...

Here's the dance remix from Thunderpuss 2000 that helped it rule the club chart for a week...

Here he is premiering the song on TV in 2001...

and lastly, in concert...

I'll be back Monday with another one from that convicted felon, talking about butts.