About whom could this apply right now? It's a word for extreme, foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with arrogance that tends to lead to a fall, and a dangerous thing in the head of someone with power who refuses to acknowledge it.
The word originates from Ancient Greek and originally had several different meanings depending on the context.In legal usage it meant assault or sexual crimes and theft of public property, or “outrage”: actions that violated natural order, or which shamed and humiliated the victim. Not so outdated in some cases then. In religious usage it meant transgression against a god.
The modern meaning is associated with associated with a chronic lack of humility that precedes a great fall.
The Fall of Icarus Merry-Joseph Blondel (1781-1853) in the Louvre in Paris
In literature, the most famous examples are Milton's Paradise Lost with the fall of Lucifer, or that legend of Icarus who flies too close to the sun, or indeed Humpty Dumpty in the nursery rhyme, though that character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass remains an arrogant, controlling, and contrary figure. Sounds familiar?
Trumpty Dumpty?
Hubris also associated with extreme narcissism, as well in the Dunning–Kruger effect in psychology, a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability.
But while there are many wider examples of hubris in song narrative, when is the actual word used in lyrics?
Let’s start with Aimee Mann's It Takes All Kinds from 2000's Bachelor No. 2 Or, The Last Remains of the Dodo, where the wearing of hubris is the devil, reaping destruction all around him.
As we were speaking of the devil
You walked right in
Wearing hubris like a medal
You revel in
But it's me at whom you'll level
Your javelin
Wasn't that just our dear friend Ron?
Throwing your weight around the sun
Happier now that you've become
What you hated
In Jenny Lewis’s Completely Not Me from 2014's Girls, Vol. 2: All Adventurous Women Do… the narrator talks about her own hubris.
I could've died that night
Way back in June
Saw my soul hang heavy above the room
Slack-jawed I confessed, bit by my hubris
I was spooked out obsessed by the moon
I was completely not me
But, baby, I'm coming clean
In a more otherworldly context, Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, and James McAlister’s collaborative song Moon from Planetarium (2017) touches on hubris via Aztec legend of the the god Quetzalcoatl, who when living on Earth, and going hungry, encounters a rabbit and a crane who offer help and end up taking a journey to the moon. The redheaded hubris also refers to the red markings on a crane’s head.
Jackrabbit jumped with a generous mood
Offering himself on the fire for food
Touched by his virtue, the fortune approved
Outlining ears on the fortress moon
As I'm about to enter your world
As I'm about to enter your world
I give you light
Some say the crane was the call for two
Stretched by the weight as her legs withdrew
Carrying the chariot, the rabbit assumed
Washing her face with the redheaded hubris
As I'm about to enter your world
As I'm about to enter your world
I give you blood
Grant Lee Buffalo’s Even The Oxen from 1996’s Copperopolis album focuses on another creature for metaphor in the context of a larger human hubris:
Here is the one here is the one here is the one mistake that can not be made
There is a line that is crossed over once and only once let it be said
All of the hubris clenched in our fist won't punch our way out of here
You know what I've told and I tell but you won't let it pass into your ears
Even the oxen ramming their heads on wood rails
Come to know pain before the rusted barrier falls
Meanwhile Dark Days by Graham Parker from the 2001 album Deepcut to Nowhere takes a direct, accusatory and very uncompromising approach on the hubris of false love:
Your conscience is worthless here
Go peddle it under the street lights
The hubris of love you carry
Is attracting a swarm of meat flies
Experimental rapper Aesop Rock is always a reliable source of broad vocabulary in lyrics, touching on the subject in in the song Cycles to Gehenna, a biblical reference that might also refer to Dantes’s Inferno. Gehenna was a place outside of Jerusalem according to the Hebrew Bible. It was thought of as the home of the wicked, translated to mean Hell …
It was less an act of hubris
More a lonely hearts club at the helm of a magic bullet
Away on a relentless bid for rarefied inertia
Rattletrap forks
Finally, let’s pick up the pace, and lighten the tone slightly, with The Mountain Brothers, rap-pop Whiplash, using hubris with some humorous self-parody. The band from Pennsylvania are one of the first Asian American hip-hop groups:
I'm quite humorous, women bag numerous
Arrogant rapper with a bad case of hubris
So then, any further references to hubris in current events, musical, political or otherwise? Feel free to share any further ones from songs, or even film, art or other contexts in comments below.
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