Long before I would come to understand who David Bowie was as an artist, his music somehow seeped into various moments throughout my childhood. Before being able to recognize the face that was printed on the Aladdin Sane album cover and even before Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars Live played on my television. Yet it would be Bowie's song 'Heroes' making appearances in many ways I would never thought I'd come to respect and adore.
After staying up pass 3 a.m. a film called Christiane F. can on and that infamous running scene, where a group of kids are being kids, getting in trouble and escaping the police. The whole time I was mesmerized by the song that played throughout that scene. When you are 10 years old, without knowing who a musician is or having the ability to know their music; that first time is not only special but it leaves a mark that follows you throughout your time on this Earth.
What I did not know at the time was that the song 'Heroes' would pop up at certain points in my life to either reassure whatever situation I had gotten myself in or take my thoughts away for a few moments to live in a song that continuously gave off an entity all Bowie's own.
Whether it was driving late at night on some lost counted road trip to California at nearly 4 a.m., lack of sleep and an endless stretch of blacktop before me. Somehow after turning off the CD that had been on repeat for the last 6 hours, an undisclosed radio station would play 'Heroes'.
To completely re-tell each individual moment would be too long and honestly I don't believe there is a real way to relate a situation or moment that has such power of a person. But of course a certain type of magic may be held accountable.
So when the day came and went after David Bowie passed from this world into the next, after learning and listening to his catalog of music without question a loss was felt. Now listening to 'Heroes' has an even more profound impact, which maybe because of the fact that I've grown up knowing who David Bowie was, his personas, the music and the films that somehow laced tracks of Bowie that bled into my affections for being a film buff.
While later in life David Bowie showed me that being different was never an issue, it would be that night when I was 10 years old, hearing a song on some film that would act as a growing conscious and soothed my fears that comes along with adulthood. Many of us cannot run away from our daily lives, yet taking a few minutes out of the day for 'Heroes' has proven to be a welcoming haunt of gratitude to an individual that undoubtedly changed the perception of the world for everyone. And I am just another one of those young adults that happened to be at the right place, at the right time.
