David Bowie
Heroes

THE REVIEW

Heroes. Excuse me, "Heroes", with quotation marks. A masterpiece, no, sorry: a "masterpiece". Heroes by Bowie belongs to that group of albums that, by popular and critical acclaim, are considered the crème de la crème of music. Sometimes this is undeniable; other times, it happens that cardboard myths are built.
Bowie is great, we know that. A great gatherer of ideas, this not everyone knows.

Heroes, date: 1977, location: Germany. Germany, does the Kraut remind you of something? The La Düsseldorf, the Neu!, the Can, Harmonia, in short, all that merry caravan that roamed between genres, rediscovering and redefining them.

David understood what was happening and, years before the Krautrocksampler and the boom of this music, decided to take a trip when the productive vein was over, and more drugs than blood flowed in his veins.

Too much to call local musicians, that would have been too obvious later. Better to find someone fellow countrymen who had followed him, someone visionary and open to all the German quirks: who better than Robert Fripp and Brian Eno?!

And off to oblique strategies, magical evenings in abandoned castles, breakfasts of onions and bread. In short, art had to be made, one had to be as quirky as all the other Krautensians. And the music? Ah, that comes later, in fact, it’s a cover-up. But here we are reviewing an album and that is what we need to talk about.
Where is the Kraut in this album? Everywhere. Starting from the title stolen from Neu! (Hero). The main source from which Bowie gorged himself is certainly the group formed by Dinger and Rother and what they did respectively with the La and with Harmonia.
Listening again, Heroes gives fewer chills (I myself am a big fan of Bowie), the electronic "Beauty And The Beast" is enjoyable, but nothing more, and the four "V-2 Schneider\Sense Of Doubt\Moss Garden\Neuklon" seem to be rehashes of various Faust and Neu!

Bowie capitalized on it (and still does) because the Kraut was (and remains, after all) a niche genre. And by now Bowie is Bowie, who can come fresh and move his behind from the altar he himself created with so much "effort"? No one, indeed, and I know this review will make many of you wrinkle your noses and say, "god David, please forgive him, he doesn't know what he's saying," but I find it absurd that no one notices how much they are part of choirs and popular judgments, following them without stopping to check a bit. I invite you to do so if you have the time/want. The Heroes are others, but he got the Fame.