Our Lady Peace released "Superman's Dead" in December of 1996 as the lead single off their second studio album,
Clumsy.
It did very well in Canada and the U.S. It peaked at #11 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart and #14 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.
The song is about how inundated we are by media. Frontman, Raine Maida, talked in an interview about how 90s kids weren't playing ball in the park, but instead they're locked up inside playing Nintendo and staying up late watching
Beavis and Butthead
instead of
Superman
. Superman was a hero with good values and acted as a gentleman and in the 90s people lost sight of that.
In an interview with Songfacts in 2012 Maida said that he thought the song felt more relevant than ever before. Maida explained, "That's probably the genius of that song, not by any part on me, but just the fact that I think the trend has gotten even tougher for kids these days. It seems that if you talk about the world going faster, my analogy back then was the subway. Now it's like we've hit light speed with ADD and the technology. I mean, just to stay focused for 20 minutes, I can hardly do it. You're just inundated. Our senses are on overload, for sure."
Our Lady Peace "Superman's Dead" 1996
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