Heroes
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Heroes - David Bowie (1977)
A six-minute anthem about two lovers kissing in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, "Heroes" was never a hit upon release — it limped to number 24 in the UK and didn't chart in the US — yet four decades later it stands as one of the most defiant pop statements of the twentieth century. Written and recorded in a divided city by an exiled superstar trying to dry out and rewire himself, it transformed sentiment into noise and noise into transcendence. The ironic quotation marks in the title, often forgotten today, are the key to everything.
Hook
There is a moment, about two minutes in, when Robert Fripp's guitar begins to howl. It is not a riff, exactly. It is a single sustained note, fed through a tape-delay rig that engineer Tony Visconti rigged in real time, swelling and decaying as the guitarist physically moved closer to and farther from his amplifier. The sound is closer to a whale call than a rock instrument. Above it, an unstable voice — Bowie's, recorded through three microphones placed at progressively greater distances and gated so that each opened only when he sang louder — begins as a murmur and ends as a shout. The song does not build. It evacuates. By the time the final verse arrives, the listener has the sensation of standing in an open field while something enormous and not entirely friendly passes overhead.
That feeling is the entire point of "Heroes." It is also why the song refuses to age in the way other 1977 hits have aged. Disco curdled. Punk became a uniform. Even the year's other titanic statements — Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks — have settled into the comfortable amber of canonization. "Heroes" remains uncomfortable. It is a love song with a sneer in its mouth, a triumph that doesn't trust its own triumph, a Cold War artifact that has somehow outlived the Cold War without becoming a museum piece.
Background
By the autumn of 1976, David Bowie was, by his own later admission, a wreck. The Thin White Duke persona of the previous year's Station to Station had nearly consumed him; living in Los Angeles on a reported diet of cocaine, milk, and red peppers, he had given interviews praising fascism, drawn pentagrams in his swimming pool, and become convinced that witches were stealing his semen. Something had to break. He chose to break geography instead of himself.
He moved first to Switzerland, then, with his friend Iggy Pop in tow, to West Berlin. The choice was deliberate. Berlin in 1976 was the least glamorous city in Western Europe — a walled, subsidized, half-abandoned outpost where artists could live cheaply, where the heroin was famously bad (a feature, not a bug, for someone trying to quit), and where, crucially, no one cared who David Bowie was. He rented a modest apartment above an auto parts shop on Hauptstrasse in Schöneberg, shared it with Iggy, and began riding a bicycle to the Hansa Tonstudio, a recording facility located just a few hundred meters from the Wall itself.
"Heroes" is the title track of the second album in what would come to be called the Berlin Trilogy, bookended by Low (released earlier in 1977) and Lodger (1979). All three were made in collaboration with Brian Eno, whose Oblique Strategies cards — a deck of aphoristic prompts designed to derail conventional thinking — were used liberally during sessions. The album's first side is conventional song-form; the second is largely instrumental, ambient, indebted to the German bands Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Cluster that Bowie had been absorbing.
The song itself was built up in layers without a finished lyric. Bowie and Eno laid down a backing track driven by bassist George Murray, drummer Dennis Davis, and rhythm guitarist Carlos Alomar, over which Robert Fripp — flown in from New York at less than a week's notice — improvised three guitar passes that Visconti and Eno then blended into a single shimmering wall of feedback. Only after the music was finished did Bowie write the words, reportedly in a single afternoon, staring out the studio window at the Wall.
What he claimed to have seen, according to an account he gave Visconti at the time and repeated for decades afterward, was producer Tony Visconti and his then-lover, the backing vocalist Antonia Maass, embracing by the Wall during a break. Visconti, who was married to someone else, asked Bowie to keep the story quiet. Bowie did, attributing the image to anonymous lovers for nearly thirty years. He only confirmed Visconti's role in 2003, after Visconti's marriage had long ended.
The song was released as a single in September 1977. Commercially, it underperformed. Critically, it was admired but not yet canonized. Its slow ascent into the firmament began only in 1987, when Bowie performed it at the Reichstag in West Berlin with the speakers angled toward the East — a concert audible to crowds gathered on the other side of the Wall, who chanted along, were dispersed by East German police, and, according to a statement issued by the German Foreign Office upon Bowie's death in 2016, helped bring down the Wall two years later.
Real meaning
The most important typographical detail in the entire Bowie catalog is the pair of quotation marks around the word "Heroes" in the song's title. They are not decorative. Bowie insisted on them throughout his life, and their meaning is corrosive: the heroes of the song are not actual heroes. They are people performing heroism, perhaps to themselves, perhaps to no one, for the duration of a single day, in full awareness that the gesture is futile.
The narrative, paraphrased: two lovers stand by a wall. Guards shoot above their heads. They kiss as if nothing can touch them and pretend, just for today, that they are above the violence and division surrounding them. The pretense is the point. The song does not claim that love conquers all. It claims that love can briefly hallucinate that it conquers all, and that this hallucination — knowingly entered, fiercely defended — is the only heroism actually available to ordinary people.
This is a far more bitter and more honest sentiment than the song is usually given credit for in stadiums, sports montages, and supermarket playlists. Bowie was not writing an anthem. He was writing the inverse of an anthem: a song that uses every musical convention of triumph — the building dynamics, the sustained guitar, the increasingly desperate vocal — to dramatize a triumph that the lyric itself frames as illusion. The music says yes. The words say only for one day. The quotation marks say don't be naive.
The Berlin context sharpens this further. The Wall in 1977 was sixteen years old, hardening into permanence. Few people on either side believed it would fall. The lovers in the song are not resisting; they are simply refusing, for an afternoon, to let the Wall decide what their afternoon means. Bowie, recently emerged from his own self-destruction, was writing about a kind of agency that costs nothing and changes nothing externally but is, for the person exercising it, the difference between being a subject and being an object.
That theme — small acts of subjective defiance against immovable structural facts — is older than rock and roll. Albert Camus wrote about it. So did the East German playwrights whose work Bowie had begun to read. What Bowie added was the sound: the specific feeling of standing very small inside something very loud, and choosing, against all evidence, to keep singing.
Cultural context for English readers
For listeners who came of age with American FM radio in the late 1970s and 1980s, "Heroes" occupied an unusual position. It was a song that classic rock stations played without quite knowing what to do with — too arty for the Led Zeppelin block, too long for the singles rotation, too European for the Bob Seger crowd. It tended to surface late at night, on free-form stations like New York's WNEW-FM or Boston's WBCN, alongside Roxy Music and Talking Heads, in the brief window before corporate consolidation flattened American radio into format.
Rolling Stone's contemporaneous review, by John Rockwell, was cautious — the magazine had been slow to embrace Bowie's art-rock turn after the more straightforward glam of Ziggy Stardust — but by the mid-1990s the song had become a fixture of the magazine's various "greatest" lists, eventually landing at number 46 on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted Bowie in 1996, has displayed Berlin-era artifacts including handwritten lyric sheets and Visconti's session notes; the museum's website still hosts oral-history clips in which Visconti walks through the song's construction.
For a certain demographic of American listeners, "Heroes" is also bound up with the experience of going to Tower Records on a Friday night in the late 1980s and early 1990s and discovering Bowie's back catalog as a kind of secret history. The Berlin Trilogy was not on the front racks. You had to know to look. The store's import bins, the listening stations, the staff recommendations scrawled on index cards — all of this is gone now, replaced by algorithmic suggestion, and something specific has been lost with it. "Heroes" was a song you grew into. Streaming culture, which presents everything at once with equal weight, has a harder time delivering that experience.
The song's American afterlife has also been shaped by its persistent use in film and television. Wes Anderson placed it, in a French-language cover by Philippe Katerine, in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. It scored the climactic sequence of the 2012 film The Perks of Being a Wallflower, introducing the song to a generation of teenagers who experienced it not as a Cold War document but as a high-school revelation. It has soundtracked Olympics broadcasts, Apple commercials, and at least one presidential campaign rally that Bowie's estate publicly objected to. Each of these uses has chipped slightly at the quotation marks. Each has also, paradoxically, kept the song available for new listeners to discover the quotation marks for themselves.
Why it resonates today
The Wall fell. The Cold War ended. New walls have been built. The structural fact against which the lovers in "Heroes" press themselves has changed shape — it is now algorithmic, climatic, economic, viral — but it has not disappeared. If anything, the gap between the scale of the forces shaping ordinary lives and the scale of action available to ordinary people has widened. The song's central proposition, that small private gestures of defiance retain meaning even when they cannot alter outcomes, has only become more relevant.
There is also the matter of the sound itself. Forty-seven years on, the Fripp-Visconti-Eno production still does not resemble anything else. Contemporary producers have spent decades trying to reverse-engineer the specific shimmer of that sustained guitar — Daniel Lanois on U2's The Joshua Tree, Kevin Shields on Loveless, the entire shoegaze movement — and none have quite replicated it, because it was a one-time accident of physical room, analog tape, and a guitarist willing to walk back and forth in front of a Marshall stack until the feedback cooperated. The song is a document of a recording method that effectively no longer exists.
And then there is Bowie's death in January 2016, which transformed the song's already substantial emotional weight into something heavier. His final album, Blackstar, released two days before he died, was understood almost immediately as a goodbye letter. "Heroes" was sung at vigils on every continent in the week that followed. Mourners gathered outside the Hauptstrasse apartment in Berlin; the building now bears a plaque. The song that had once described two strangers pretending, for an afternoon, that they were untouchable became a song about Bowie himself, who had spent fifty years pretending to be untouchable and had finally been touched.
This is the trajectory available to only a handful of songs across the history of recorded music: written as a specific intervention into a specific historical moment, expanded through performance into a generational anthem, contracted again by the death of its author into a private elegy, and now somehow holding all three meanings simultaneously without contradiction. The quotation marks still do their work. The heroes are still only heroes for a day. And the day, it turns out, can be any day at all.
How to dive deeper
🎧 Listen
Low (David Bowie) The first installment of the Berlin Trilogy, released earlier in 1977, with the same Eno-Visconti team and a starker, more fractured emotional register; essential context for understanding what "Heroes" is reacting against. → Search
The Idiot (Iggy Pop) Recorded by Bowie with Iggy in the same Berlin period, this is the shadow album of the trilogy — same producers, same city, same mood, but filtered through Iggy's voice and instincts. → Search
📚 Read
Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town (Thomas Jerome Seabrook) The most thorough English-language account of the Berlin years, drawing on interviews with Visconti, Alomar, and others; granular on studio process without becoming hagiographic. → Search
Strange Fascination: David Bowie — The Definitive Story (David Buckley) The standard critical biography, regularly updated, with particularly sharp analysis of how the Thin White Duke persona collapsed into the Berlin self-reinvention. → Search
🌍 Visit
Hansa Tonstudio, Berlin The Meistersaal recording room — the so-called Hall by the Wall — is still operational and offers occasional tours; standing in it, the spatial logic of the song's three-microphone vocal setup becomes immediately legible. → Search
Hauptstrasse 155, Schöneberg, Berlin Bowie's apartment building, now marked with a commemorative plaque installed in 2016; the surrounding neighborhood retains much of the unglamorous late-1970s character that drew him there. → Search
🎸 Experience yourself
Build a Frippertronics-style tape delay rig The looped, sustained guitar sound on "Heroes" was produced by feeding signal between two reel-to-reel tape machines; modern pedals like the Boss DD-500 or a TC Electronic Flashback approximate the effect and reward extended single-note experimentation. → Search
Read along with the lyrics in a divided-city context Pair a listen of the song with a few chapters of Anna Funder's Stasiland — oral histories of life in East Berlin — to feel the actual political pressure the lovers in the song are pretending, for one day, to ignore. → Search
- What changed in Bowie's writing between Low and "Heroes" that allowed the second album to be warmer without being sentimental?
- How did Robert Fripp's brief, improvised contribution reshape the rest of his own career with King Crimson and beyond?
- Why did the song's commercial profile rise so dramatically between its 1977 release and its 1987 Reichstag performance — and what does that gap reveal about how anthems are actually made?