Did a rock-and-roll song really help crumble the Berlin Wall?

David Bowie’s “Heroes” is not a patriotic anthem; no, it’s a strange six-minute song that starts with a man wishing his lover could swim like a dolphin. Like a dolphin.3 From there, the lyric goes on to share the scene of a clandestine kiss beside a wall, under a sky riddled with bullets. It’s a beautiful, haunting image, but did this song really help change the course of history?

God, I hope so.

Beneath the geo-politics and macro-economics, beneath all the complicated factors that shift the real lives of people and yet seem so far out of their own control, is that thing called the human spirit. The human spirit—that force that has braved frontiers, on earth and in space, in technology and sport, that has birthed nations, industries, religions, and masterpieces, that has faced down tanks, tyrants, and the ugliest oppression—well, surely, that magnificent force can chip away at a few stones.

And we know—we know from our own highs and breakthroughs, from our own moments of mustering a strength we weren’t sure we had—that nothing moves that human spirit like music does. It shifts our feelings, and then it changes our behavior. It starts with toe-tapping and shoulder-swaying and singing along, and it ends with you feeling understood or turned on or more powerful than you were mere moments before.

Music moves us, and it moves us.

Which is why the ancient Greek philosopher Plato believed that music, like a dangerous drug, should be regulated by the government. He loved its ability to bring order to the minds of children and rouse bravery in the hearts of warriors, but he worried that “innovation” in music might just incite society-spinning rebellion.4 And he was right, of course. Look at the history of civil protest in America: there were slaves singing spirituals on southern plantations; there were hippies and radicals marching to the strums of folk songs; and there were gay rights activists in New York City discos where dancing itself was an act of exuberant political defiance. This music wasn’t just the soundtrack of these movements; it was their soul food. Plato was right to be worried about the awesome power of ABBA.

So yes, I believe David Bowie’s song did something big that day. It inspired. On an early June night, with springtime ripe in the air, that song stoked the ambition for freedom in the hearts of thousands of prisoners enslaved by an impoverished ideology. That night, they went back to their homes with a renewed conviction that their wall would certainly fall—and it would fall by their own hands. David Bowie—who couldn’t even see them—was singing to their aching yearning for liberation, imploring it, “Yes, yes, be free! Be heroes!”

“It was almost like a prayer.”

As Bowie’s guitarist, Robert Fripp, remembers it, “[With that song] David was speaking to what was highest in all of us.”5 He was assuring those thousands—on both sides of the city—that walls and guns were no match for the awesome power of standing and kissing and dreaming, of being insistently human in a place hell-bent on stamping out that humanity.

I imagine it was the most beautiful sound in the world.

And David Bowie did all of that six days before President Ronald Reagan showed up at the very same spot telling Mr. Gorbachev the time had come to tear down that same wall. Reagan told Gorbachev to get the job done. He was working “top-down,” as the management consultants say. But David Bowie knew who the real heroes could be—would be.

Of course, that wall was torn down almost exactly three years later, and I choose to believe that as those Berliners chipped, chiseled, and tossed aside those stones, so many of them still heard “Heroes” in their head from that night David Bowie sang it to them. Yes, Bowie’s song moved stones.

And here’s the twist of a gift David Bowie has given the rest of us with that song: the assurance that each of us can be a hero—at least for one day. It sounds so reasonable, right? Even those of us who feel surrendered to our humdrum lives could imagine a day—just one day—when we Jerry Maguire ourselves to do something remarkable. Even the most cynical amongst us can admit that, yes, we might each have one day on which we can stride the world like a giant and swim its oceans like a dolphin.

But then what?

What happens after the one day on which we flex our heroic muscles, the day after we quit our job, leap into love, stand up to bullies, put down the drugs, start a new business, or vow to crush our cancer? We already had our one day, didn’t we?

Oh no, we just listen to the song again.

Each time we hear your song, Mr. Bowie, the counter gets reset, and we get one more day to be a hero, boundless opportunities to crush walls to rubble, and change the course of the world. Sure, we can be heroes, for one day—and that one day will always be the day ahead of us.