David Bowie’s song “Heroes” made NR’s list of the greatest conservative rock songs almost exactly a decade ago. Now it has inspired the title of NR contributor Robert Dean Lurie’s excellent new ebook, We Can Be Heroes: The Radical Individualism of David Bowie. Lurie makes the wise observation (which never had occurred to me) that the song probably was inspired at least in part by the characters Winston and Julia in George Orwell’s 1984. But that’s just a throwaway observation in a relentlessly smart book about Bowie. Here’s the thesis:

David Bowie, quite simply, was the most radically individualistic popular entertainer we have ever seen. He took individualism to a place where he gave himself nearly complete artistic freedom, while still working within the bounds of taste and beauty. We don’t get Howard Roarks in real life. But we did get David Bowie.

Roark is a reference to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, but don’t worry: Lurie has not written a piece of objectivist propaganda. Instead, he has given us a skillful tribute to a wonderful and beguiling entertainer. If you’re one of those conservatives who, like me, thinks we need to be more engaged with pop culture (because “politics is downstream of culture”), then We Can Be Heroes is for you. It’s also just $2.99. Just buy a copy already.