The 1970s File Feature
(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman
"(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman" — The Kinks Reinvented for New Wave's Dawn Survival in the Age of Punk By 1979, a lot of the bands who had been famous in …
01 The Story
"(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman" — The Kinks Reinvented for New Wave's Dawn
Survival in the Age of Punk
By 1979, a lot of the bands who had been famous in the 1960s were either quietly fading from view or scrambling to adapt to a landscape that had been dramatically redrawn. Punk rock had arrived in the UK like a wrecking ball in 1976 and 1977, and its American cousin, new wave, was busy colonizing FM radio and college campuses. Legacy acts faced a stark choice: retreat into nostalgia tours or find a way to make music that felt genuinely current. The Kinks, improbably, had already been reinventing themselves for over a decade, and in 1979 they pulled off another successful transformation with Low Budget, the album that contained (Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman.
The Kinks by this point were an entirely different commercial proposition from the band that had recorded "You Really Got Me" fifteen years earlier. Ray Davies had spent the intervening years producing a body of work of extraordinary range, from the pastoral English melancholy of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society to the theatrical concept albums of the early-to-mid 1970s. Some of those records had been critically adored but commercially modest. The band needed a hit, and they needed to prove they belonged in the same conversation as the contemporary acts dominating radio in the late 1970s.
The Low Budget Album and Its Context
Low Budget was the Kinks' most commercially successful album in years when it arrived in 1979. The record leaned into a harder, more muscular rock sound with a wry lyrical sensibility that acknowledged the economic anxieties of the late 1970s, the inflation, the energy crisis, the general feeling of belt-tightening that characterized the period in both Britain and America. The tone was sardonic and knowing, filtering those real-world pressures through Davies's trademark ability to find the absurd in the everyday.
(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman fit squarely into that thematic territory. The song's central conceit, the fantasy of superhuman capability in a world that seems to require it just to get by, carried both comic and genuinely melancholic registers. The production was harder and more direct than much of the band's 1970s work, with Dave Davies's guitar work providing an edge that connected the track to the rock radio format that was driving sales in America at the time.
Chart Performance and American Momentum
The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on April 28, 1979, debuting at position 85. The climb was steady over the following weeks, moving through the mid-range with the kind of consistent upward momentum that reflects genuine radio traction. The track reached its peak position of 41 during the week of June 16, 1979, spending 12 weeks on the chart in total. That performance, combined with the album's overall success, confirmed that the Kinks had successfully bridged the gap between their legacy status and the demands of the contemporary rock market.
The late 1970s American FM rock format was a specific and demanding context. Stations were playing a mix of established album rock acts, emerging new wave artists, and classic rock with heavy rotation. For a British band that had spent the early-to-mid 1970s largely outside the American commercial mainstream, breaking back in with genuine chart presence at this stage of their career was a significant achievement.
Ray Davies as Cultural Commentator
The song showcases one of Ray Davies's most consistent gifts as a songwriter: the ability to take a broadly recognizable cultural reference (in this case, the Superman mythology that had been refreshed by the enormously successful 1978 Richard Donner film) and use it as a vehicle for social commentary that operates on multiple levels simultaneously. The yearning expressed in the title is both funny and entirely genuine, a simultaneous joke and an honest articulation of the desire to be more than ordinary circumstances allow.
This kind of layered writing had been a Davies signature since at least the mid-1960s, but the harder rock setting of the Low Budget era gave it a new directness. There was less cushioning, less pastoral gentleness. The frustrations were rendered in sharper relief.
A Late-Career Flourishing
The track represents one of the more striking examples of a major band from the 1960s successfully navigating the transition into a completely different era. The Kinks would continue to generate commercial and critical interest well into the 1980s, but the Low Budget period, anchored by singles like this one, was the pivot point. The 12-week chart run of (Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman demonstrated that Ray and Dave Davies still had the creative instincts to convert cultural observation into genuine commercial product.
Press play and hear one of rock's great survivors doing exactly what survivors do best.
"(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman" — The Kinks' singular moment on the 1970s charts.
02 Song Meaning
"(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman" — Powerlessness, Pop Culture, and the Late-1970s Squeeze
The Superhero as Metaphor for Ordinary Frustration
Superman was everywhere in 1978 and 1979. The Richard Donner film had turned the character from a nostalgic comics property into a modern blockbuster icon, and the phrase "faster than a speeding bullet" had reentered the cultural vocabulary with fresh energy. When Ray Davies reached for the Superman mythology as the organizing metaphor for a song about ordinary human powerlessness, he was working with a cultural shorthand that his audience understood immediately. The gap between what Superman could do and what an ordinary person could manage in the face of late-1970s realities formed exactly the kind of ironic distance that Davies had always used to maximum effect.
The Weight of the Late 1970s
The period in which (Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman arrived was one of genuine collective anxiety in both Britain and the United States. Inflation had eroded purchasing power through much of the decade. Energy prices had spiked following the oil shocks. The sense that individuals had limited control over the large forces shaping their lives was widespread and deeply felt. Davies tapped into that collective frustration, using the superhero fantasy as a way to acknowledge it while simultaneously finding the absurdist comedy in the gap between the dream and the reality.
This approach, using pop culture fantasy to articulate genuine social and economic anxieties, was characteristic of Davies's best work. Rather than writing explicitly political material, he consistently found oblique and often funny angles that made the discomfort accessible and even pleasurable to engage with. The lightness of the musical approach, the hard rock energy of the track, kept the underlying darkness from becoming oppressive.
Fantasy as Emotional Release
The thematic function of the superhero wish in the song operates on several levels simultaneously. At the most literal level, it is simply the expression of a desire to transcend ordinary limitations. At a deeper level, it captures something universal about the human experience of wanting more capacity than circumstances provide. The fantasy of flight, of escaping the ground-level difficulties of daily life by simply rising above them, resonates in a way that purely abstract expressions of frustration might not.
The specific genius of Davies's formulation is that the wish itself is rendered in a bracket, a parenthetical, in the song's very title. Even the fantasy is qualified, presented as an aside rather than a declaration. That grammatical gesture perfectly captures the tentative, half-embarrassed nature of the wish itself. People in the late 1970s generally knew that inflation would not be solved by superheroes; what the song offered was permission to have the fantasy anyway.
The Kinks' Long View and the Song's Place Within It
Positioned within the broader arc of the Kinks' catalog, the track belongs to a specific and fascinating late chapter. By 1979, Ray Davies had been writing songs about British and American social life for fifteen years, producing work that ranged from the anarchic energy of the early records to the introspective literary richness of the concept album period. The Low Budget era brought a new directness, a deliberate stripping away of ornamentation in favor of hard, immediate communication.
The result was a set of songs that translated the band's characteristic intelligence into the more unvarnished vocabulary of late-1970s rock without losing the wit and observation that made the Kinks distinctive. (Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman is one of the most effective examples from that period, and its 41-peak chart position on the Billboard Hot 100 confirms that the communication landed. The song still carries its meaning clearly, because the fundamental human experience it describes has not gone anywhere.
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