Heroes?
‘“Heroes”’? Are you joking? ‘"Heroes”’? Alright. Just . . . For a second. Whatever.
So. An individual who is quite close to me recommended a movie. I suspect that this recommendation might have been partially motivated by the heavy presence of Emma Watson, but I can’t be dealing with such idle speculation at this juncture. I’ll just say that a pig with a funny name isn’t going to help anyone. Probably. I don’t know. I mean . . . Maybe you could sell it. If anyone could, it’d be you.
Anyway. You have these youths. Right? Apparently, they have great taste in music, but it goes beyond that. On some level, they are defined by it. It gets to the point of stopping during a party to point out the supposed surprise at the fact that good music is actually being played there. It seemed weird for them to mention that because of “Come on Eileen”, but that’s really just my thing. I suppose that it’s a decent song. I really wouldn’t know.
Whatever. Fine. That’s how taste works.
But this isn’t about taste. This is about . . .
How do you not know ‘“Heroes”’? I’m not saying this because I love David Bowie. The dude has recorded a lot of stuff, and a lot of people love him in many different ways. The classic rock aficionados have “Ziggy Stardust”. The serious artistic types have “Station to Station”. Even the soul types have stuff like “Young Americans”. Incidentally, I might be totally wrong with these assumptions, but I think that the point is still being expressed adequately. The guy has recorded heaps of diverse music, and each section reaches different people. He just released his first single in a decade, and I didn’t even listen to the whole thing. You know? That’s how it goes. And some stuff from any catalogue is going to be pretty obscure.
‘“Heroes”’ is not one of those. I’m pretty sure that ‘“Heroes”’ is basically his most famous song. He’s had all of these different phases that have been attended with various kinds of fame, but this is the one song that gets played everywhere without provocation. What’s the one David Bowie song that was selected for inclusion in Baz Luhrmann’s ode to the majesty of the 20th century’s music? Boom. ‘"Heroes”’.
These are a bunch of young dudes who let taste in a decent amount of mildly obscure music have a significant effect on their shared sense of identity. And I’m believing that they hear ‘“Heroes”’ for the first time in their final year of high school and take an entire school year to even get the name of the song? For one thing, they didn’t just hear it at some party. It was on the radio in their car. They couldn’t wait for five minutes to hear the name?
I realise that I’m being horribly hypocritical with all of this. When I was 14, the entirety of my modest social group believed that Jimmy Page was dead. I don’t even know how that happened. I don’t think that any particular member just brought it to the rest of us. It really just seemed like some fact that all of us knew independently. Some of these people barely even talked to each other. Whatever. This isn’t really about minuscule musical myths.
Maybe that was part of the point? Ignorant vanity of youth? All of that? I don’t know. I suppose that that works. I think that the movie was fair in parts. The first act felt like a generic high school comedy without the humour, but the fact that I’d spent an hour with those characters before interesting stuff started to happen made me care about them when it did. Compliments for that. Oh. The movie was “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”. This paragraph definitely could have gone at the beginning.
Bonus Question!
Best Bowie costume? The one from "Jazzin' for Blue Jean".