Heroes immediately departs from the attitude of Low's melancholia with The Beauty and the Beast, and this was a sign of hope for fans aware of Bowie's descent into drug addiction.
As the first of the Berlin trilogy, Low was already a product of Bowie's choice to change behaviour and marked a divergence from pop music with Northern European influenced ambient work (to the distaste of RCA and manager Tony Defries). Bowie had moved to Switzerland in 1976 to access the music scene there which interested him, and to try and divert himself from cocaine. Later the same year he moved again to West Berlin to work with Brian Eno on a new project which could pull him away from drugs. The project became the Berlin Trilogy, consisting of Low, Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979). I feel it is safe to say that without the intent that created these records David Bowie might well have lived a much shorter life due to cocaine use - he overdosed several times in 1976 - and these records are the snapshot of a pop star fighting his way back into reality. It is a great shame to lose a talent like Bowie, but we might not realise what a very lucky culture we are to have seen him survive past his initial success.
Although Heroes is not as distinctly a pop album, it is more accessible than Low, which feels like an artist lancing his wounds. Low is what you would expect from its title and was one of Bowie's least commercially successful records. As a piece of art is is a brilliant insight into not the throes of addiction that can produce superstars but a normal person trying to escape. Heroes is the positive album that comes after, with pop songs just starting to integrate back into ambient pieces like Moss Garden, and new influences showing through on Neukoln - Bowie had immersed himself in the rock and avant-garde art movements of Berlin of the era.
Heroes did spawn some hits, the title track in particular, and the record stayed in the charts for 26 weeks, peaking at number three. However, the album is a mess. It is consistent in its inconsistency, a problem for a record label. No two songs really occupy the same genre - possibly Heroes and Blackout do, but they're really a trap to get you into the rest of the album. This is Bowie's real talent. He has taken something far outside the box, or the norm, and mixed it with his mastery of the things inside the box, and made the box bigger. All his releases up to the Berlin era had done this to an extent, but the trilogy was a turning point. Bowie could have faded away into mainstream culture; the influences and mindset behind the Berlin Trilogy kept him on the frontier of what popular music could be. The greatest artists do not regurgitate, but show you how they are changing through their art. Whether successful or not they are honest. Heroes was the upswing after Low, the upswing that could never have been, and maybe we have this album to thank for all those that came after.
