Week 24 | “Heroes” (1977)

“Heroes” opens with my favorite song. That song isn’t, “”Heroes.”” Its “Beauty and the Beast.” I have spent years contemplating this song. Though Bowie might not have meant it to really mean anything, I have taken it as being about the internal struggle between virtue and temptation, and possibly more specifically about adultery. That’s not why I like it. I like it because of how it sounds. That’s the case for most of this album, which features Bowie’s voice near or at its prime.

Bowie sounds so good (I especially like “Blackout” and “The Secret Life of Arabia”) that the inclusion of four (out of ten) instrumental songs seems to me to have been a wasted opportunity. This is sacrilege to some Bowie fans, but my view about Bowie’s instrumentals is that as good as they are, they are missing two things I like about Bowie songs— his voice and his lyrics. OK, his voice isn’t entirely absent. He does in fact sing the words, “V-2 Schneider” on the song, “V-2 Schneider.” And it isn’t that I dislike the song, or any of the instrumentals on “Heroes”— they just don’t draw me the same way the vocalized songs do. I have most of the vocalized songs from this album on my I-Pod, but not the instrumentals. To amplify the sacrilege, I have often thought that the vocalized songs from this album, combined with those from Bowie’s previous album, “Low,” and without the instrumentals, would be a truly great album. (Of course now with playlists, that is a pretty easy album to create…and guess what? The songs are actually pretty different, so it isn’t as obvious a match as my original inclination).

The other song I don’t have on my iPod is “”Heroes.”” “”Heroes”” is of course one of Bowie’s signature songs and I certainly like it, but in my mind it isn’t even one of my favorite from this album, let alone Bowie’s entire catalogue. I have a slightly negative Pavlovian reaction to it because the song is sometimes used as if its only lyric was, “we can be heroes.” The protagonists actually seem pretty pathetic, or desperate or in trouble…but not actually heroic. Its like Madonna singing, “like a virgin.” But the usage of the song at times when heroes are celebrated is something like another 80s, hit, “Born in the USA”— does the audience actually listen to the lyrics? Bowie himself is guilty of misusing his own song. It was one of two he sang at the Concert for New York after 9/11 (at least one of two on the album). His performance of the song is excellent, but is the message about a couple fantasizing about being heroes before something terrible happens really the right message as a people was girding for the long-haul after something terrible happened? Anyway, none of that misaligned context is on the album, and there’s a reason the album title and song title appear in quotes.

So at the end of the day, “Heroes” is a mixed bag for me. I frequently listen to a few of the songs from this collection and seldom listen to others. Unlike, say, “Heathen,” I rarely listen to the entire album straight through.