‘Heroes’: The protest song so effective we forget its a protest song
“We can be heroes, just for one day,” David Bowie sings and that’s the line the world remembers. That’s the big singalong moment, that’s the line that made the anthem. But it’s also the line that seemed to blur away the rest as that vast, universal sentiment of bravery with it’s broad vagueness doesn’t capture the complex protest within the song.
People know that one line, but only fans would know the entire six-minute-long run time of intricately crafted narrative verses. Telling the story of two lovers, separated in different parts of Germany and unable to reconnect due to the Berlin wall sitting as a social, political and literal block between them, it’s subtly protesting as he packed the lyrics out with scenes from a divided city and flashes of conflict.
The mere act of writing a love story of an East and West Berlin Romeo and Juliet is, in its nature, protesting. Their desire to come together again calls for the fall of the wall and all the politics and propaganda that surround it, even if the song doesn’t straight out say that.
But Bowie seems to know that love is often the best tool for this kind of thing. Deciding to write this song as a love song taps into the power of that universally special emotion to fuel the politics of the piece. It was the origin, too, as the artist was working at Hansa Studio 2, existing essentially in the shadow of the looming divide. He looked out of the window one day and saw his producer, Tony Visconti, kissing a woman right by the wall. He was also enamoured with art like Lovers Between Garden Walls, a piece by German artist Otto Mueller that he saw at a gallery in Berlin.
As a strange expressionist painting of two people kissing in between a dark mess of bricks surrounding them, it seemed to him to be the perfect image for this political moment to protest the way divides were coming between connections.
To Bowie, that rousing central lyric, “We can be heroes,” was supposed to be an empowering call to arms. As he imagined the scene of these two lovers having their lives affected by this divide, that line is a call for bravery not only from these two but from everyone else. It says that for a moment, for just one day, anyone can step up and make a difference or bring about change.
“I, I can remember / Standing, by the wall / And the guns, shot above our heads / And we kissed, as though nothing could fall,” Bowie sings as the song climaxes in what is the track’s most overt and almost revolutionary lyric as he turns his two lovers into kinds of superheroes, painting this gorgeous and bold scene as they do seem to take a stand, embracing in the middle of the conflict. It’s undeniably political as he sings of guns and walls in a song written in the divided city.
But after the wall did fall, that fact seems to be lost in favour of remembering the song as just a rousing track about the power of love. Part of that is likely down to Bowie, as the shortened radio edit definitely loses some of the song’s epic nature, but part is down to the inevitable fact that time moves on. Given how specific the track is to Berlin during the 1960s to late ‘80s, ‘Heroes’ more pointed protest had loosened to a broader meaning to allow its timelessness.
