Musical Snapshots: David Bowie – Today marks the release of “Heroes,” one of his most influential albums

"Heroes" is essential to Bowie's catalog of albums to understand the man behind the personas, who manages despite obstacles to create the ultimate Cold War album.

1977 was the year that punk emerged from the fringes and swept like a hurricane through the United States and Britain (and the rest of the West to a lesser extent) as a cultural reaction to the "pretentious" and "excessive" music of prog and art rock.

This led to the steep decline in popularity of many "rock dinosaurs", leaving David Bowie and many other artists at a crossroads.

In Germany, and especially in Berlin, where the path for a large part of the new musical trends was paved, Bowie created three of his most important albums between 1977 and 1979. The "Berlin Trilogy" began in January 1977 with "Low", and continued with "Heroes", released on 14 October of the same year, made with the same main collaborators, namely Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, and with the addition of Robert Fripp from King Crimson. It is in a way the natural evolution of "Low", and the only album of the trilogy ("Low", "Heroes" and "Lodger") to be recorded entirely in Berlin.

“Low” and “Heroes” are two very different albums, which is a bit strange considering they were released just nine months apart. The former is alienating and atmospheric, with equal parts rock and electronic music. It’s fun, playful, yet melancholic, both in its songs and in the orchestral pieces on the second side. “Heroes,” on the other hand, is cold and mechanical, beautiful, and at times terrifying. Lyrically, it’s darker, and even the glam/electro sound of some songs can’t light up this darkness.

The music continues to move in the electronic and ambient tones of “Low”, while maintaining the same structure, where the first side includes songs while the second is mainly orchestral pieces. “Heroes” is much denser and more complex and its songs more mechanical and industrial, avant-garde and experimental even for Bowie, and not so easily digestible. It is a dark, mysterious and intensely thematic album that explores the facts and balances of the Cold War.

Without a linear plot, the album revolves around the emotional and political turmoil of the constant threat of a nuclear holocaust. The dark and gloomy lyrics create depressing and cold images. The lyrics of the title track were directly influenced by the Berlin Wall, as the “Hansa Tonstudio” where the recordings took place was just a few hundred meters away.

The Cold War climate, a divided Europe, and the nuclear threat greatly influenced krautrock and European punk, and Bowie was no exception. The fast-paced, "conventional" rock songs that largely make up the first side are intended to be exciting and menacing at the same time, and they do their job perfectly. The title track is about the relationship of two people who are separated by a wall, only to become "heroes" by dying tragically.

“Sons of the Silent Age” details the paranoia and madness of war. The industrial sound of “Blackout” is characteristic of the atmosphere that exudes the entire album, and remains one of the most terrifying tracks in Bowie’s vast catalog.

On the opening track “Beauty And The Beast,” the line “there's slaughter in the air, protest on the wind” sums up Germany in the late 1970s. If this album was intended to capture the atmosphere of Cold War-era, divided Berlin, it succeeded.

The second side takes us to different landscapes, creating the feeling that nuclear war has begun and the destruction has already begun. Ambient orchestral pieces take us through doubt (“Sense of Doubt”), calm surrealism (“Moss Garden”), the terror of a destroyed world (“Neukoln”), and multiculturalism in the mysterious “The Secret Life of Arabia”, which closes the album with a cliffhanger-like climax.

While “Heroes” is an excellent album as a whole, there is clearly one track that stands out, and that is none other than the eponymous “Heroes”, one of Bowie’s greatest and most iconic songs, which is at his lyrical best here. The way in which he conveys the paranoia, romance and despair of not only his personal life, but also the Cold War in the two worlds of the city of Berlin, on both sides of the Wall, is unique. The sound, like Fripp’s guitar playing, is innovative and distinctive and the “wall of sound” orchestration creates a completely suffocating atmosphere, with a gradual crescendo until the last minute, where everything that has been accumulated reaches the breaking point.

It’s fascinating how an artist can make such a big leap from a great album like “Low” in less than a year. Comparisons aside, “Heroes” is essential to Bowie’s catalog of albums to understand the man behind the personas, a man with addictions, depression, and personal demons who manages to create the ultimate Cold War album despite the obstacles.

“Heroes” was loved by audiences and critics alike and reached No. 3 on the charts. Fripp’s enormous contribution to the album and Bowie’s overall artistic development is widely acknowledged, and today “Heroes” is considered one of Bowie’s finest and most influential works. The title track, which initially failed as a single, has remained one of his most well-known and widely played songs.