The 60s was about Real Men making Real Rock Music – the simian swagger of the Stones, the muscular Hendrix, the roguishly wasted and virile Lizard King, and of course, the Beatles, whether in their slim suited son-in-law or beardy psychedelic manifestations. The 70s, by contrast, belonged to the transhuman, gender-fluid freaks – the effete Bolan, the garish space jam of Pink Floyd, the prancing, glittery, drug-addled Rocket Man. Needless to say, the pale-faced and otherworldly Empress of this cultural shift was David Bowie, a deadass alien who disembarked from a spaceship on January 1st, 1970, to announce the end of the swinging sixties and, with it, the abrupt termination of two decades of post-war economic and political stability. The Oil Shock, escalation in Vietnam, Watergate, deepening urban decay and insecurity lay ahead, their chilling and unhinging effects ramifying throughout popular culture, their chief prophet a Starman waiting in the sky.
Anyway, that’s the narrative. But for all the supposed ideological oppositionality of 60s rock and 70s glam, any musical innovations on Ziggy Stardust are barely perceptible from the vantage point of 2023. Half a century after this album was first released, it doesn’t seem such a dramatic departure from late 60s rock music. Maybe it’s a misconception on my part, but I thought glam was supposed to be, basically, trashy pop married to irascible, chainsaw-like guitars, à la Sweet or Slade. This slice’n’dice, quintessentially 70s sound does occasionally pop up on Ziggy Stardust but, overall, the musical tone is reedy, almost gentle, driven more by piano and strings than guitars (not unlike other contemporaneous “glam” records such as T-Rex’s Electric Warrior or Roxy Music’s self-titled debut). Bowie didn’t go in for the scathing, seething sound I associate with glam until Aladdin Sane, Ziggy Stardust’s icy, cantankerous, less approachable follow up.
One thing is for sure, though – Ziggy Stardust does represent a kind of thematic, or psychological, departure from the romantic utopianism of the 60s. It’s in the lyrics of the album’s opener, “Five Years”, which is apparently about humanity discovering that there are only enough resources left for five more years of life on earth – which makes Bowie’s “brain hurt a lot”. The most instructive aspect of the song is its garish depiction of urban decay and decadence. If the 60s were about abandoning urban sprawl and returning to nature, then “Five Years” thematises and darkly romanticises the discombobulating chaos of the concrete jungle. This is one of the album’s key themes: a cataclysmic cover of Ron Davies’ “It Ain’t Easy” sees Bowie climb onto a rooftop to survey the cityscape and despair at the state of humanity, while “Suffragette City”, though lyrically opaque, seems to sketch the Weimar Berlin-esque scenario of someone getting cockblocked in a city of college-educated radical feminazis.
The point is that we’re now very far from John Lennon’s exhortation to abandon your ego and dissolve into the loving oneness of being, to “surrender to the void”. Instead, we’ve got police officers kissing priests while the end of the world looms. The necessary socio-political background to this profound cultural shift was surely the sense of crisis that enveloped the West in the 1970s, and particularly an increasing awareness of ‘urban decay’, of big cities locked into a downward spiral of decadence, crime, joblessness, and depravity. The City of New York almost went bankrupt in 1975 and, from what I can gather, basically started to resemble the first level of Streets of Rage. But rather than decrying this encroaching civilisational dissolution, Ziggy Stardust conjures a contrarian, quintessentially glam celebration of it, a retreat from trying to change the world into an active embrace of decadence and solipsistic rock’n’roll. Sonny, the protagonist of “Star”, gives up trying to change the world and elects to become a rock star instead – partly because he “could do with the money”.
60s optimism and authenticity have evaporated, replaced by a celebration of naked materialism and artifice. And “Star” is indeed instructive, because almost half of the songs on Ziggy Stardust are about rock stardom. The creation of a fantastical rock group called Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars has obvious 60s continuities, because the Beatles had done something similar with “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” but I’m not sure if the musicians in the Fab Four’s phantom supergroup ever contemplated breaking the narcissistic prick of a lead singer’s fingers so that he couldn’t play guitar and pull all the girls. This is precisely what we get on Ziggy Stardust’s title track, however, even though, in the end, it’s “the kids who kill the man” – perhaps an ominous foreshadowing of John Lennon’s death in 1980 at the hands of a deranged fan.
Ziggy Stardust’s thematization of the bizarreness, depravity, and unhinging effects of rock’n’roll celebrity continues with “Lady Stardust”, which introduces us to the cross-dressing frontman of an unnamed rock band who commands the fascinated attention of femme fatales, and the insecure derision of carnivorous male rockers. Bowie’s role is to remain an inconspicuous observer, but isn’t Lady Stardust his own onstage identity, so that he is, like Ziggy, basically making love with his (alter) ego? It’s not clear and that’s obviously the way Bowie liked it. But whereas “Lady Stardust” offers a treatment of glam’s foundational gender ambiguity, the proto-punk of “Hang On To Yourself” addresses the more prosaically straight phenomenon of sleeping with groupies – or, perhaps, of groupies wanting to sleep with David. A cursory google search indicates that “Hang On To Yourself” is about “staying true to yourself” and “your dreams”, the usual Oprah Winfrey-esque platitudes, but this is nonsense – it’s surely about Bowie admonishing his groupie-of-choice not to get too fucked up during the gig so that he can, as it were, fuck her after it. Another reminder that gender bending was really part of David’s act, rather than an expression of his “authentic sexuality”, insofar as any such tediously naturalist concept ever existed.
And yet, in the face of Ziggy Stardust’s central theme of exuberant and demonic rock’n’roll artifice, the album also has moments of sincerity and earnestness – two, to be exact, though one of these is rather ambivalent, so maybe it’s more like one and a half. “Soul Love” is a tender tribute to Bowie’s almost religious belief in the transformative and revolutionary power of amore. Characteristically, though, this fervour is mitigated somewhat by his sneaky implication that carnal attraction and desire are irrational, almost preposterous, though nonetheless uniquely powerful forces. By contrast, “Rock’n’roll Suicide” seems unimpeachably sincere. Bowie appeals to an unnamed, chain-smoking friend not to kill himself, even as he looks down at the water from the bridge, to remember that he’s “not alone”, that he’s “too unfair.” This is a moment of incongruous compassion and human feeling amidst the album’s coldly and ironically stylised decadence, superficiality, and cops kissing the feet of priests. Someone should have played it to Richey Edwards but, anyway, you can at least see that Bowie’s heart was in the right place – and it’s an unmistakeably British heart, as the reference to a milk float reminds us.
When all is said and done, though, the fact remains that, in the popular imagination, the essence and historical resonance of David Bowie lies not in his debauched celebration of glamor and rock’n’roll decadence, nor in his rare but notable moments of humanity, but in the fact that he was a bona fide space alien singing about Ground Control and Major Tom from the cockpit of Apollo 11. And this most enduring element of Bowie’s legacy, the sci-fi extraterrestrialism, is very much in orbit on Ziggy Stardust, most notably on “Moonage Daydream” and “Starman.” The former is thunderous, rudely shattering the coy soppiness conjured by “Soul Love” to recount a Philip K. Dickian story of being in love with some kind of robotic alien. “Starman”, by contrast, opens with a soft, warm, though somewhat haunting acoustic guitar, and combines the eerie apparition of a levitating extraterrestrial with incongruously mundane glimpses of a typical 1970s middle-class household. Unlike the sinister “Space Oddity”, this is a good-natured song, a kindly alien who won’t come down to earth because he’s afraid to blow our tiny minds, and who insists on letting the kids dance.
So quite a trip, all in all. To be honest, though, I’m not blown away by the songs, given the album’s immense reputation. They’re short and snappy, the production and vocals clear and crisp – it’s good, even very good, in parts. But, for my money, it all sounds a bit dated, especially compared to some of the later Beatle’s records, which have aged better. I like and admire all of the songs, but I don’t particularly love any of them, with the possible exception of “Starman”. Typically for Bowie, it’s more appealing on an intellectual level – and indeed, Ziggy Stardust is jam-packed with ideas, from sci-fi weirdness to rock’n’roll gender bending. Above all, the shift in mood from the 60s is palpable. It’s already there on the album cover, which depicts Bowie in a dark alleyway, surrounded by parked cars and trash, a gaunt blonde prophet of urban(e) decadence and societal decline. Darkness has fallen across the West; the centre cannot hold; and soon many more oddities will scuttle out of the woodwork to join the Thin White Duke in making our brains hurt a lot.
Overall: 7/10
Highlights: “Five Years”, “Starman”, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”