Heroes
Yesterday, I came across a cover of David Bowie's song Heroes, performed by Berlin-based Stereo Total. I'm not a Bowie fan, but I have been listening to Stereo Total on and off for 25 years now. The cover version didn't disappoint, I had to listen to it a few times.
This got me thinking. To begin with, the whole "David Bowie goes to Berlin" story has always bothered me, because it essentially glamourized a form of squalor. It's one thing if you lived in Berlin at the time, or if you were a West German trying to escape West Germany's leaden atmosphere by going to Berlin. It's quite another for an international rock star to go to basically feed off what for other people was their daily life. It's a form of cultural appropriation combined with what today, after years and years of neoliberal capitalism, has become very common: a commodification of someone else's life style.
But there's more. Bowie's music had been used in a West German movie that was based on a book by a young woman only known as Christiane F. The book and movie centered on the vast drug problem that was a huge topic in West Germany at the time. Christiane F was a few years older than me. The book had already been out when I was in high school, where we talked about it. In the town I lived in, the drug problem wasn't as pronounced and public as in larger cities. I remember that when I went to Berlin or Frankfurt/Main, the steps of train stations were literally covered with people who were either high on heroin or were trying to get some money to buy more.
There's a scene in the movie (you can see it in the second video), in which the group of kids around Christiane F run through some indoor shopping mall, while Bowie's song is playing in the background. The director had worked with young people who weren't real actors. If I remember this correctly, permission for the filming also hadn't been obtained. This explains the cinéma-vérité look, which of course now has become a feature of reality TV.
The glamouriziation of the circumstances the kids found themselves in always rubbed me the wrong way. I suppose you could argue that nothing is glamourized in the movie, and I can see the point. That said, through the music and now through us looking back to that West Berlin (the one Bowie parachuted himself into), there is a certain glamour to it all: the "real", grimy Berlin that now has mostly disappeared.
Christiane F Remake 2003 Stereo Total Heroes - YouTube
Stereo Total “Heroes”from the theatreplay “Christiane F - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo” by Francoise Cactus 2003featuring PC Kisur, Sim Gil, Reimo Herfort, Jul…
Someone took the Stereo Total cover version and added it to the scene from the Christiane F movie. This is something you really want to watch, because it unmasks the unreality of the original and the ways in which it manipulates the viewer. The movie with Stereo Total added looks and sounds ridiculous.
At the same time, there's an opening to consider what we're actually looking at. For example, the slightly goofy playfulness of Stereo Total's music is a lot more in sync with the playfulness of the kids running the indoor mall.
I that different version, the visuals and the music are completely at odds because now... Well, they actually aren't at odds themselves: they sync up perfectly. However, now things are too playful. Suddenly, the actors don't look like troubled teenagers any longer who long for some freedom. Now, they look like children in outsized bodies, which essentially they were.
They are actual young women and men from Berlin, and it's the city's actual sound -- as opposed to something created by a bunch of temporary British visitors who created stylish music.
I suppose at the end of the day, what I'm interested in here are how our ideas of a place or situation often (always?) trump the actual reality. Berlin now has become this strange place that supposedly offers what actually has been destroyed by so many people moving there (including a lot of foreign hipsters). If you want the Berlin spirit of the past, you're much more likely to find it in, for example, Warsaw (a short five-hour train ride to the East).
As I mentioned, neoliberal capitalism has turned all of this into one of its modes of operation, which makes trying to wrap one's head around it even more difficult: is there still a sincerity in our desire for "the real" possible -- when any embrace inevitably destroys it?
I don't know.
As always, thank you for reading (and watching)!
-- Jörg