The Thing That Works

The BVG made a song. Frank Sinatra’s My Way, reinterpreted by transit employees in a glossy video that commits fully to the concept—cool and confident and aware of its own absurdity. The premise is simple: a public utility loves you. They’ve decided to sing about it.

And they’re not entirely wrong. The BVG gets you to work at 6am with a coffee you managed to grab, then to a stranger’s apartment at 2am after too many drinks, then home the next morning when that situation resolved poorly. For years it was just invisible—the system that works. You didn’t think about it until it broke, and then you suddenly understood how much you depended on it.

For a long time they didn’t try to be anything but reliable and unglamorous. Then came an adidas collaboration, which worked fine, and now this: a full song, BVG employees as performers, a serious commitment to the idea that yes, we love the people we move around the city every day. The audacity is kind of charming. A public utility deciding it can participate in culture.

The video itself is what you’d expect—glossy, competent, forgettable. What matters is the commitment. Whether this is genuine affection or marketing is hard to parse, and maybe it doesn’t matter. They’ve done the obvious thing well enough that they’ve earned the right to try for something else.

It’s the kind of move that works in Berlin. A city that doesn’t perform seriousness, where a utility can decide to be cultural and it reads as natural rather than desperate. Everyone else is working overtime to seem cool. BVG was just content to move people, and that turned out to be the coolest thing anyway.