My Top 100 Albums: #76 - David Bowie, ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’
76.
David Bowie, ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’
RCA Victor, 1972
It’s hard to believe, looking back on it now, that The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust wasn’t conceived as a concept album, but rather began life as a collection of songs that were originally written for David Bowie’s previous release, Hunky Dory. In fact, the only reason this album exists is because the music on Hunky Dory was deemed to be unsuitable for live performance and Bowie needed some material that was more crowd-pleasing, in order to take the material on tour. A pretty low-key origin story for a project that still endures as one of the great performer’s most ground-breaking works. Thematically, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust is a biography of the character in its title: a bisexual, alien rock star who arrives on Earth on the eve of apocalypse. Musically, it is often retroactively labelled as one of the origins of the glam rock movement, with its arena-rock vibes and showy presentation. Indeed, this album, along with Lou Reed’s Transformer and Iggy Pop’s Raw Power, all released within a few months of each other, goes a long way to marking a changing of the guard between the era of hippies, Woodstock and psychedelics, and the new era of androgyny, sartorial flamboyance and heavy electric guitars. I think Ziggy Stardust’s biggest impact, aside from influencing future stars such as Elton John and Freddie Mercury, is in its celebration of femininity within men, and in its wider vocalisation of LGBT themes, something which would have been impossible in the stuffy and somewhat patriarchal 1960s. The album is far from the finished product in this regard, and one could perhaps accuse Bowie of appropriating queer identity and imagery, but this album, in both its lyricism and its style, opens up new worlds in a very repressive context. The music is spacious and joyful, even ironic in the face of themes such as apocalypse and reactionary politics, and contains some of Bowie’s most enduring work, on the likes of Starman and Ziggy Stardust. Bowie would go on to release many critically-acclaimed albums, including several number ones, but for me this is his record that feels the most complete and the most focused musically. His influences, most notably his aforementioned contemporaries Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, are right at the forefront of this project and the music is all the better for it. Bowie retired the character of Ziggy Stardust from live performances in July 1973, but still the iconography of the character is inherently tied to his mythos, and will surely endure for long into the future.
Hidden Highlight: Five Years
Five Years
Soul Love
Moonage Daydream
Starman
It Ain’t Easy
Lady Stardust
Star
Hang On To Yourself
Ziggy Stardust
Suffragette City
Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide