Monday, June 6, 2016

David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust (1972)

Hunky Dory was a great continuation and realization of what David Bowie had created up to that point. However, for as many times as we've said that Bowie's career takes off, I do honestly see what they mean with Ziggy Stardust.

Bowie was always able to capture the strangeness of others, of people, and particularly of rock stars. He lived as an artist, a musician, and Ziggy Stardust is no less the capturing of that persona. The ideas presented here are what we feel echoed in other masterpiece albums, such as Pink Floyd's The Wall.

I want to make clear, I have enjoyed David Bowie up to this point. However, Ziggy Stardust is the first album in this discography in which every song feels like it captures the tone correctly for the whole album. It has few outliers, it has a direction and composition that is nearly perfect, and I have not felt the same level of struggle and appreciation in the lyrics, the guitar, the piano, the band as I have from this album. This is a landmark, this is a canonized album, and this is deserving of the title of Masterpiece.


1. Five Years

Favorite Lyrics: "A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest / and a queer threw up at the sight of that"

Five Years is the melancholy opener. As a tone-setter for the album, I think it's great. There's a sense of dread that permeates the themes and lyrics of Ziggy, but what makes that tone great is Bowie's constant undercurrent of love, appreciation, and mortality. The cacophony of clocks, violins, and Bowie shouting "Five Years!" is a dreadful experience and masterwork composition.

2. Soul Love

Favorite Lyrics: "Inspirations have I none"

Soul Love with its bluesy bass line and sexy saxophone asides accompanies this song. Soul Love is poetically inclined towards love, but it treats love as a careless force of nature, or as something that he is incapable of resisting. Honestly, the lyrics in Ziggy can seem aimless at times. But the composition here is just so catchy and fun.

3. Moonage Daydream

Favorite Lyrics: "The church of man, love / is such a holy place to be"

The song takes place from the perspective of a star on stage. Here we get maybe a follow-up to that uncaring love in Soul Love. The man on stage seems to be battling with a crowd, struggling to get his song out, while at the same time wanting the attention of everyone. His is at once muffled and gratified. If Ziggy is reflecting the plastic pop-star persona, then this song delivers that note well.

4. Starman

Favorite Lyrics: "Let the children lose it / Let the children use it / Let all the children boogie"

The otherworldly pop rock of Starman creates such a rocking mood. It is good in keeping with the theme of pop star as alien. The song is very simple but its got a good mix of guitar and drums and strings to create a very relaxed rocking sound. In short, it's an infectious song about an infectious subject and I think it's just groovy.

5. It Ain't Easy

Favorite Lyrics: "It ain't easy to get to heaven when you're going down."

This is an interesting song, primarily because its a cover of a song. A clear blues song, Bowie includes it on this album perhaps to break-in something that fits with his idea of what that pop star persona is. Naturally the lyrics here are not terribly reflective of the rest of the album. It's an other song on an album about feeling like an other.

6. Lady Stardust

Favorite Lyrics: "And he was awful nice / really quite out of sight"

Lady Stardust continues a line of groovy easy listening from Bowie. Here we get a much more piano-focused song. Here we focus on an outsider perspective, watching the stars on the stage. This continues a theme of tone poems focusing on popularity, fame, stardom, music, love and the intersection between all of those things.

7. Star

Favorite Lyrics: "I could do with the money / I'm so wiped out with things as they are"

Star is a song that I think speaks to everyone who has ever been musically inclined. Bowie does a great job painting the artistic voice in all of our heads. If the rest of the enjoyable track doesn't sell it, the end of the song where simple things like sleep and love are reliant on some sort of personal success captures the notion.

8. Hang On To Yourself

Favorite Lyrics: "Well the bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar"

Hang on to Yourself features an almost pre-surfer fast guitar riff. The speed and casualness of the lyrics reflect the title of the song. Reliance on the band to keep you up with them reflects a change in the lyrics and heading into the last part of the album, might be the titular "fall" for Ziggy Stardust. The end of the song speeds up and ramps up the intensity.

9. Ziggy Stardust

Favorite Lyrics: "Making love with his ego Ziggy sucked up into his mind"

This song really tries to push a narrative into the album. While there is an established story for Ziggy Stardust, I didn't really feel it throughout the album like on an album such as The Wall. But the story here is about Ziggy getting too famous, outshining the other band members, and becoming the focus point of their popularity.

10. Suffragette City

Favorite Lyrics: "Wham Bam Thank You, Mam!"

Interestingly this song fills a gap between Ziggy Stardust and Rock n' Roll Suicide, two songs that thematically are probably a lot more appropriately linked. I don't know what to make of Suffragette City, besides the fact that it's a nice fun, plastic pop-rock song that is incredibly enjoyable.

11. Rock n' Roll Suicide

Favorite Lyrics: "You're (wonderful) not alone!"

This slow album closer remains quiet for most of its running time with Bowie giving us lyrics about the end of popularity, the suffering of fame. There is progress of the themes, all of that love for music, all of that appreciation from a crowd. Bowie claims that the narrative of the album ends with the audience rushing the stage and devouring Ziggy alive. Thinking about the image of a crowd eating the body of a rock star while shouting "You're not alone!" creates a perfectly tonal ending for this album. The end of that vicious cycle of desire, rock, fame, love, appreciation ends on the moment that you die on stage. The final swing of the music is fantastic.

All in all Ziggy Stardust didn't make me fall in love with the idea of David Bowie, but it feels like the purest appreciation of him. It's the first album in this exploration that I will come away knowing it was great. If you've been underwhelmed by Bowie, just give this album a listen. And if you can't appreciate this, Bowie just might not be for you.

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If you liked this, then maybe you'd be interested in what I thought of David Bowie, Space Oddity, The Man Who Sold the World, or Hunky Dory. Next week I'll be going over Aladdin Sane. Every Monday another Bowie album until we're done, and then more!

Did you catch my review of The Lobster? It is after all "one of the greatest films of the year so far." If you've seen it, then stay tuned as I discuss it's commentary about modern relationships in a Feature on Thursday.

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