David Bowie, "V-2 Schneider" (1977)

(listen)

This is one of only a few of the experimental-style soundscapes hatched by David Bowie and Brian Eno on Low and "Heroes" that I can actually say I much care for. More often, occupying the side 2s of their first two collaborations, I think the exercises lose focus, wallowing along in their own vapors, though certainly concentrated effort can provide its rewards, as it always does when one wants it to. But this song, which kicks off the second side of "Heroes," is pretty much undeniable. All in the thick of the collaborators' incoherent embrace of Berlin and the Cold War as existential moral imperative—highly alluring in its specific historical moment, but nonsensical—it has always leaped right off the album for me, soaring like Thomas Pynchon's language. The love of Bowie (more than Eno, I suspect) for all things Berlin extends ever so delicately into ... what? "Schneider" is not just the last name of a Kraftwerk principal, after all, but also a maneuver intended to prevent an opponent from scoring a point, and the V-2 rocket is what rained down on London. But never mind that. Washed through in layers of rocket screams and the static found between radio and television stations, this mostly instrumental track (there's various humming and some singing of the title) rides a rhythm section pattern of sure-footed bass and little snare-drum figures, lets its layers pile high on one another, gets soulful with a sax, coalesces on lovely fragments of melody, throbs, aches, swoons, and briefly flares into gray widescreen before tailing away back into oblivion, all of it accomplished once again in just over three minutes. Meet the new pop song.