Some songs arrive as artifacts of a specific moment and stay there, sealed inside their context like insects in amber. O Superman is not one of those songs. Laurie Anderson wrote it in 1981 in response to a failed American military mission — helicopters sent to rescue hostages in Iran, crashing in the desert, achieving nothing — and the song should by all rights belong to that moment. Instead it keeps finding new ones. She performed it in New York in the weeks after September 11th and the lyrics required no edits. A generation later it resurfaced again, the same quiet dread attaching itself to new events with an ease that is more unsettling than any single political reading could be.

What the song understood — and what keeps making it current — is that the problem it diagnosed was never really about Iran, or any specific failure of American power. It was about the structure underneath: what happens when the systems we build to protect us become indistinguishable from the systems that threaten us. When the arms that hold you and the arms that kill you are the same word. When the technology is so total, so anonymous, that nobody pulls the trigger and therefore nobody dies — except that people do. Freeman Dyson, writing from inside the weapons establishment at almost exactly the same moment, called it the same thing from a different angle: technology has made evil anonymous. Anderson made that sentence sing.