the essays: 11/5 - Our last Ziggy Stardust post is an Ancient Scientist banger meditating on the end of the 60's, the end of childhood, and a new awakening. Amazing stuff. Now if only I could find a picture of that Ziggy Stardust poster... (UPDATE: I think I did!)
Note that the winning Halloween Bowie persona was Ziggy Stardust and that a new poll is up involving our next (beginning on Wednesday 11/7) album: Springsteen's Tunnel of Love. The question is simple: Bruce or Bowie?
11/3 - LB wonders whyZiggy Stardust fails to completely blow him away, which leads to a few questions and some terrific answers.
11/1 - How about that. The Angry Young Man snuck in with a post about organization which is soooo fascist Bowie. (the organization part, not the post itself) It lingered down at blog bottom for a day or so but now it's up to its rightful place!
the introduction: A martian, a miscast Messiah, music mythology. Ziggy Stardust. If you can follow the album's story I suppose it makes perfect sense. But what does it mean, man? Well, what does it mean to you? The album's been adored, venerated in film, and played on jukeboxes in the most unlikely and likely of places. Let's listen again.
Poll Question: which David Bowie persona would you most like to be for Halloween? Ziggy Stardust - 25% Halloween Jack - 8% Aladdin Sane - 8% Thin White Duke - 16% Fascist Bowie - 0% 80's R&B Bowie - 25% Jareth, the Goblin King - 16% Tin Machine Bowie - 0%
Poll Question: Bruce (Springsteen) or Bowie? Bruce - 33% Bowie - 66%
Just before my older sister got into DC Hardcore (this was the '80's, when Georgetown was cool), she listened to rock music, but rock music that sounded more dangerous and mature than the stuff on the radio like the Thompson Twins or "Karma Chameleon." This was when I was 10 or 11, on the cusp of adolescence but still basically a kid. In this phase, my sister had the holy triumvirate of the 1970's represented on her wall. (No, RS reader, this is not Elton John, Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles.) I didn't know who any of them were, but I was fascinated by them because they seemed so cool, exotic, and older sister.
There was a poster of Lou Reed, although I didn't know the name, blurred out (it was the "Rock n' Roll Animal" album cover), and a weird poem about "smack" and "jim-jims" and "politicians making crazy sounds and dead bodies piled up in mounds." I didn't know what any of it meant, but I loved reading it because of the way it sounded (the opportunity to discuss this one will come later in the blog's life). Iggy Pop did not have a poster, but was instead represented by some lyrics my sister had scrawled on the wall in ball-point pen next to the phone where she exchanged dark secrets with her cool older friends.
And the king of them all was Ziggy Stardust, in a huge black-and-white poster, gazing down on the room like an alien space God pharaoh, with that disk of make-up on his forehead, glowering. He seemed so weird, I didn't know if it was a boy or a girl, and I didn't even associate that poster with the David Bowie that my sister always prattled on about. I didn't know who this creature was, but I knew he was better than me, knew everything, had to have seen it all, and certainly was able to be cool in a room full of cool older people, and probably wasn't "such a fucking spazz," like me.
I also remember from this period the song "Starman" playing on my sister's tapedeck. I didn't associate the song with the poster or with David Bowie, but I loved it. It sort of seemed like a children's story, but with an extra dose of sadness that I always liked, like "The Little Prince." It was about an alien who knows all this stuff, but he's afraid to come let us know about it because it will "blow our minds." I wanted him to come anyway - I thought that I understood him, and that I could withstand what others who didn't get him couldn't. The song made me feel like I was an insider, and that there were squares out there keeping the world from cool guys like the Starman. But I could handle it, I knew it.
I did not pursue Bowie, and my sister moved on to DC hardcore, as I said, (but, to her credit, never took down the Ziggy Stardust poster), and then she went to college. I started listening to music like Led Zeppelin, the Who, Beatles, Dylan, all those guys, music I loved then and love today. And so when I rediscovered Bowie in high school, it was sort of coming at him through my blossoming interest in 1960's rock music.
Which is very appropriate. Bowie started off as a flower child, admiring Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd at the UFO Club. His grossly underrated first album, Space Oddity, trafficked in the mystical psychedelia of his peers, although it was already showing signs of something different, with the legendary title track's evocation of outer space travel not so much a Pink Floyd-ian freakout as it was an opportunity to meditate existentially on loneliness and insanity. Paralleling Marc Bolan's evolution from Hobbit-rocker Tyrannosaurus Rex to glam-god T-Rex, Bowie went in a new direction as the 1960's, at least on the calendar, came to a close.
Ziggy Stardust is the culmination of Bowie's metamorphosis. Gone was the flower child singing of free festivals and laughing gnomes, and here was this freak celebrity rock star, delivering a new message to the waiting masses from on high. This reinvention was total, requiring a new persona, that of the alien Ziggy with a new message for the kids. What was this message? In a lot of ways, Bowie's still the '60's kid, singing about space aliens, dreams, and freaking out, testing the limits. But things have changed, babies. The alien is not singing about a tribal, communal experience of mind expansion: this exploration is a personal trip. It is a coming-of-age story, telling the young ones, those at the feet of the knowing alien, that the new territory is sexual awakening. I mean, look at the video.
Look at these young girls being flattened, communing with something they had not yet experienced, sex with a superior being, the knowing one, the better one, watch them undulate at the 2-minute mark, watch the girl in post-coital extasy after Mick Ronson's guitar solo has taken her "out... far out..." This is a new message of rock n' roll, purely Dionysian, the rock god celebrity spectacle rather than the tribal communion. It is the moment when the Moon/Teenage Daydream, the devotion to the rock idol, finds its communion in the performance on the stage. It is a return of music to its nature as an ecstatic, sexual rite, away from the everybody politics of the 1960's. Listen Suffragette, leave your feminist trip behind if you want to really go places that are REALLY out there. You can't afford the ticket to my show, you've got too much baggage for the good time. Are you a real freak? Well, no more kid stuff.
This sounds cold, and it can be, this brutal reality. But your rock n' roll momma/poppa, he's been where you are, he understands. "Just turn on with me, and you're not alone." The trip we're taking, the one in which he leave the kid stuff behind, it's a suicide, in a way, the death of your old self so that the new one, a freak alien, but an aware one, unlike those perma-children who never test their boundaries and remain squares with their childish hangups their whole lives, can be born. Bowie was performing a rock n' roll suicide on all of the naive things he cherished - everyone cherished - in the 1960's, signaling that that ego ideology of exploration was reaching its inevitable and logical conclusion. Bowie was killing the 1960's; against the deeper, more basic power that he was representing, that era would seem quaint, nostalgic, too easy ("cuz it ain't easy.")
That's why, as exhilarating as the posters and their promise of coolness and dark secrets in my sister's room were, I also knew there was something scary about them, about what I was going to go through as I said goodbye to my childhood years. At least I would have Bowie to help me.click here to read it all...
David Bowie's legendary The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars is about as bad of an album as it possibly could be.
Seriously.
But I love it anyway.
Here's what I mean: given the superb material and the excellent musicians involved, I don't think that this album could be much worse than it is. When I consider the great songs here unto themselves, it amazes me that this album fails to completely blow me away, leading me to ponder a few questions:
Is it overproduced?
Possibly. Only "Five Years" and "Ziggy Stardust" strike me as particularly strong renditions that really do the material justice. On the other hand, "Hang On to Yourself", the raucous badass opener in D.A. Pennebaker's film of the band's final concert, limps onto the middle of side 2 and barely registers. "Moonage Daydream", "Starman", and "Suffragette City" are all as castrated as Wendy Carlos (whose work from the Clockwork Orange soundtrack can actually be heard playing before Ziggy and the Spiders take the stage in the film!): Mick Ronson's playing is not punchy and present enough in this mix, with too much space given to keys, mellotron/strings, and backing vocals instead. Don't get me wrong, these recordings are definitely enjoyable, and it's not as if one has to listen hard to hear the obviously great songs, which remain evident, it's just that they could have been appreciably better.
I'm not just speaking theoretically here, either: both the Pennebaker film, despite a flawed, inconsistent mix, and the 2000ish archival release Bowie at the Beeb offer glimpses of how much more powerful these tunes could be in the hands of these same musicians in less heavily produced contexts. I do not mean to say that the production flourishes were all bad, either, but they seem to wash out much of the feel and impact.
Was too much time and effort spent on promotion and not enough on the album?
Particularly revealing to me on the recent Rock Milestones DVD, which offers a historical and critical overview of the album featuring interviews with bassist Trevor Bolder, drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey, and horror Angie Bowie, is how much emphasis was placed on building Bowie up into a rock star at this time by his handlers, to the evident chagrin of these folks (who were all quickly discarded by Bowie once that stardom was attained).
For example, the US tour consisted of the band playing a show somewhere, then partying for a couple of weeks in order to build up a high profile as extravagant, wild rock stars, although the record company had to subsidize it, since Bowie himself was not wealthy yet. While such theatricality is an undeniably critical, integral element of the whole Ziggy Stardust phenomenon, one has to wonder whether the music itself ended up being neglected in the whole process.
Bowie even neglected to finish writing a story about Ziggy in these songs. If this album can actually be viewed as a concept album at all, then that concept is, at best, half-baked, which is not a big problem in and of itself, since it would have worked out fine had the end result been that Bowie employing the concept as a basis for inspiration, since I would never demand adherence to a concept as a qualification for the creation of a rock album. Instead, the song order apparently follows the intact but skeletal remains of the plotline derived from the original concept, when it probably would have made for a better album if he had departed from those plot-related aspects of the concept altogether in order to attain a better flow, limiting the influence of the concept to a mere thematic nature.
Despite some evidence of overproduction weakening the impact of Ronson's playing in particular, it seems like some of these issues may have been resolved, had there a been a more concerted effort to work out the issues with the mix and song order, rather than making it a priority merely to get a product out there for Bowie to promote. I am definitely not sure on this point, but given what we know about Bowie's activities during this period, I have to wonder where the priorities lay.
Did Bowie step on Ronson's arrangements?
This supposition consists mostly of my reading between the lines, but some of the comments made by the interviewees on the Rock Milestones DVD led me to wonder whether Bowie and Ronson's joint production efforts didn't also lead to some compromises that weakened the album. While Bowie undoubtedly was the ring leader here, Ronson held responsibility for arranging much of the studio instrumentation. Bowie frequently insisted on providing his own touches, for which, despite his lack of technical studio expertise at the time, he deservedly acquired a reputation as having an extraordinary ability to select seemingly randomly instruments that would help beef up a tune. Contrasted with Ronson's more technically adept background in evidence on his arrangements, there was plenty of potential for friction there.
Someone on the Milestones DVD (I believe that it was bassist Trevor Bolder) notes how much he would have liked to have seen Mick Ronson given a shot at a whole project, which seems like an odd comment on its face, since Ronson produced multiple albums over the course of his career, so I take this to mean that what he meant to say, in a roundabout way, was that it was a shame that Ronson could had not been given full rein over this project. Yeah, that wasn't going to happen, since, again, this was Bowie's deal, but it leads me to believe that the commenter felt that Ronson's arrangements had been damaged by Bowie.
What about the vast legacy of this album?
Huge and undeniable. . .but even that could have been greater had either of the two films related to this project worked out better!
Unfortunately, the film quality of the Pennebaker film puts a lot of folks off, and, despite a scorching performance, the inconsistent mix is far from ideal. That said, it is great to have any filmed documentation of that tour, but it's a shame that the film remains so underappreciated, mostly due to technical issues.
Then we have The Man Who Fell to Earth, which, although it is an adaptation of a novel, is a solid film that's pretty much about a character that's extraordinarily similar to Ziggy Stardust, who happens to be played by David Bowie. Sounds great, huh? Well, it falls short of greatness, mainly due to one, glaring problem: no Bowie music! At all. Instead, reportedly due to contractual issues, there's a thoroughly unremarkable soundtrack provided by John Phillips (they just had to find a guy who had even bigger drug problems than Bowie's!) that seems like a placeholder for what should have been the tunes from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, which is a real shame when one considers how much more vital the movie could have been with those tunes. Another squandered opportunity!
But you love it anyway?
Oh, yeah, the issues aren't that serious, and I'm definitely overstating and overanalyzing them here. If someone digs Bowie, then they'll love this. However, given the material and musicians, it easily should be a top 20 all-time album, but it's not. It should be Bowie's finest album, but it's not.click here to read it all...
The 1970s David Bowie was arguably a pretentious postmodern prima donna and a man of a numerous faces who, at his creative height, was constantly and deftly moving from one personality to another and inevitably teetering towards identity crisis, not to mention self-destruction. But, these same tendencies and characteristics helped make him perhaps one of the greatest theatrical actors of the 20th Century – up there with the likes of Barrymore, Olivier, Gielguld, Robeson, Dench, Tandy, Julie Harris and the lot.
The grandiose notions of pretense that he espoused and controlled so effectively elevated his art of acting and took him to experiment with an assortment of images, concepts, and artistic styles like few others before or since. That he did his acting in the music industry should not detract from his cultivated thespian greatness or his mastery of artifice and affectation, key elements in most type of acting and which allowed him to invent and embody so many diverse and interesting characters and to sing with so many distinct voices (and accents).
1972’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is the album for which he and his rock n roll theater became internationally famous. The fictional killing of Ziggy in the final UK concert is legendary and serves as the image by which many associate this album and the title character, yet the songs themselves only loosely tell the story of the most famous rock n roll alien (all apologies to George Clinton and his Mothership). While Ziggy and his band from Mars is an interesting and novel notion that is eye-catching and represents a brilliant exercise in pop star making, what truly makes the album special is the mastery and manipulation of different stage genres, themes, and settings in an extremely cohesive and competent musical oeuvre.
Ziggy is replete with theatre and seemingly demands audience participation, not unlike some NYC cinema showing The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Halloween. “Lady Stardust” has the languidly rolling cabaret piano effect that made “Life on Mars” so dramatically moving. “Star” is made for Broadway – the essence of the musical Grease, the famous production created and released for the first time at around the same time of Ziggy. “Hang on to Yourself” is the theatre of idolatry and imitation, referencing and encapsulating Bolan’s adorable and hip-shaking rock boogie of Electric Warrior in one song. How economic! “Five Years” and “Rock n Roll Suicide” are overtly histrionic, yet are enormously captivating and inevitably moving. They provide seemingly perfect bookends and certainly set the tone for the drama, characters, and images in the body of the album. “Moonage Daydream” and, to a lesser extent, “Ziggy Stardust” are the blueprints for another realm of performance and theatrical attitude and face changing – that of glam.
Ziggy is certainly not the first in the long line of Bowie’s impressive interpretive works of the 1970s. Hunky Dory, released a year before Ziggy, also experimented in various theatric styles including the aforementioned cabaret and showtunes. What sets Ziggy apart from its predecessor, however, is its move towards a larger, more unified overall artistic concept and tone (like the setting of a stage with distinct design pieces), something that would define subsequent Bowie albums in the 1970s, from the Orwellian inspiration of Diamond Dogs to the plastic soul of Young Americans and the avant-garde and Teutonic electronic music experimentations of the Berlin series (Low, Heroes and The Lodger). One could even argue that the outer space imagery (notice four songs have the word “star” in them, while another carries the word “moon”) and glam pretences of Ziggy make it the most fantastic, overtly ambitious, and delightfully decadent of the 70s albums. The creation of the title characters and the outrageous and audacious lyrical phrasing (“I'm an alligator/I'm a mama-papa coming for you/I'm the space invader!/I'll be a rock and rollin' bitch for you!", or “There’s a starman waiting the sky/He’ll like to come and meet us/But he’s afraid he’ll blow our mind”) give the music a surrealistic, otherworldly feel, tending towards delightful and guilt free escapism, certainly a nice counterpoint to the somewhat static and drab social and economic environment of 1970s England.
Of course, I would be remiss to focus entirely or disproportionately on the fantastic and grandiose exercise in imagination and dramatic myth-building that is Ziggy. Beyond the makeup, allusions to the solar system, and pompous strut, Ziggy is bursting with great swinging and even soulful rock n roll. The great Mick Ronson guitar riffs of “Moonage Daydream” and “Ziggy Stardust” are well known and have been commented on countless times. And, the sped up Lou Reed NYC swagger with the Elton John/Little Richard rock piano in “Suffragette City” has fed classic rock radio for years now. But, how about the steady, swaying, and seemingly effortless groove between the loud outbursts of guitar-led insistence of the chorus on the song “Soul Love”? A most friendly tune made even more captivating by its internal heterogeneity. The backing singing on the album, often by Bowie himself, in the chorus parts is also noteworthy as they provide some sublimely soulful moments. Check out the “ohh, ohh, ohh’s” in the background of the overdubbed chorus vocals of Bowie in the aforementioned “Moonage Daydream”. They provide the melodic soul that drifts and elevates and, not unlike the elements of “Soul Love”, creates a catchy contrast with the raucous blasts of guitars as Bowie screams “Freak out in a Moonage Daydream, oh yeah!” The energetic, earnest, and proud chorus of “It Ain’t Easy”, carried in part by a gliding slide guitar and the sound reminiscent of early 1970s southern rock of the States, is yet another example of the pure rock groove and soul of the album. In sum, the sound of Ziggy still holds its weight today despite the somewhat dated image gimmickry associated with the album.
Rolling Stone magazine has listed Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars as number 35 on its list of the 500 greatest rock n roll albums of all-time. Considering the prolific and high quality – not to mention flat out influential – album output of Bowie in 1970s and taking into account that Ziggy is what really put Bowie on the pop and rock map, the number 35 seems ridiculously low. Perhaps the album Low could vie for serious top 20 consideration for its tremendous influence on later music trends and artists, but a safer bet for the rather conservative and traditionalist Rolling Stone would be Ziggy, an album that along with its predecessor, Hunky Dory, helped usher in an extremely innovative period for Bowie and, more generally, in rock n roll (see explanatory footnote below). Indeed, the 1970s production (and later influence) of Bowie rivaled the amazing streaks of creativity of both the Stones and Beatles, both of which benefit from numerous albums each in the Rolling Stone top 30. In this light, then, number 35 for Ziggy seems rather unjust.
Admirers of Bowie can take refuge in the fact that he almost single-handedly spearheaded his own artistic zenith, whereas groups like the Beatles and Stones relied upon more than one person. Of course, given the dramatic shifts in character, sound and vision (to almost borrow the title from one of his songs) that he almost continually sought, Bowie was mostly and inevitably a one man theatrical show with a relegated supporting cast. Top billing for their great interpretive art is what the Gielgud’s and Olivier’s received. Logically, then, Bowie deserved the same.
Footnote: Despite the ongoing excesses of 70s Cali singer-songwriter rock and stadium rock, the 1970s also marked a period of stimulating and influential – although less popular – experimentation, part of it inspired by the works of Bowie and Eno, among others.click here to read it all...
Ziggy Stardust's lyrics and themes brim with so much preposterous ridiculousness that they must constitute some kind of gleeful in-joke. As in "if you aimed to find a message or a story here then the joke's on you".
Well, I tried to find a point and er, I get it, Ziggy is Christ. The world's about to end. Christ's reign has come.
The album then, chronologically, "kiss(es) the feet of a priest", then a "son give his life to save", "Love descends", and "my God on high is all love,". But Love isn't the only thing descending. Here comes Ziggy telling us that "the church of man, is such a holy place to be" and that "There's a starman waiting in the sky, he'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds".
And right here's where I turned off the lyrics, left Narnia, and began ignoring Bowie's Aslan. This must have been Bowie's intention because right then he started talking to me. "Just listen to the tunes," he mystically beckoned. "They're the real deal." I restarted the disc and ignored the schmaltz. He was right, the song's really are the thing.
But why the Christ-as-a-Spaceman thing? "You see," my imaginary Bowie replied, "I was out of ideas so I copied the theme from Jesus Christ Superstar. It was 1971, that show was the biggest thing in the theatre. People loved its silly plot; they took it as important and deep and filled with a real message. I figured, 'why not', Andrew Lloyd Webber's got nothing on me. I got better tunes."
Of course he did. Most of the melodies rise with rapture and beckon to the masses. Suffragette City, Starman, It Ain't Easy, Lady Stardust, Ziggy Stardust; all perfect tunes, perfect melodies, perfect driving rushes. The other songs though - the thematic bridges, the story advancers - I can't really get into. I blame Andrew Lloyd Webber.click here to read it all...
exile staff consensus: Top 200 album
