1001 Albums Summary

B, 68% The first thing Ziggy Stardust does is announce the end of the fucking world and the second thing it does is make apocalypse sound suspiciously like community theater. I mean that affectionately, partly. “Five Years” begins with Mick Woodmansey’s drumbeat coming down the street one dull thud at a time, not Armageddon drums, not John Bonham knocking God unconscious, just this almost bureaucratic pulse while Bowie starts reporting catastrophe like somebody reading a newspaper aloud after the pubs have closed. Earth has five years left. People are crying. Children are drinking milkshakes. A cop kneels to kiss somebody’s feet. The entire species has received an eviction notice and Bowie, rather than doing the obvious rock-star thing and screaming immediately, keeps accumulating pathetic human details until the song finally cannot contain him anymore. His voice rises from reporter to witness to hysterical asshole clutching strangers on the pavement, and by the time he is repeating “five years” the vocal has gone beautifully ragged around the edges. This is one of the places where Bowie’s theatricality stops being costume and becomes nervous-system damage. He does not convince me because the apocalypse is plausible. He convinces me because the man singing has abruptly become unable to regulate himself. That final vocal sounds like somebody who started acting and accidentally discovered a real emotion in the middle of the performance, which is a dangerous thing to happen to David Bowie because the motherfucker’s entire career depended on keeping several emergency exits available between himself and sincerity. And then, almost immediately, the record starts fucking around. This is what keeps The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars from becoming the enormous personal revelation its reputation keeps sending ahead like an advance publicity team. I like the bastard. Quite a lot of it works beautifully. Several moments are absolutely lethal. I understand why the album colonized bedrooms, wardrobes, adolescent sexuality and record collections for fifty years. But the myth is bigger than the music, and hearing it now means confronting an album whose concept has been inflated by cultural memory into some kind of queer extraterrestrial Wagnerian rock scripture when the actual record is a compact batch of very good glam songs, several extraordinary performances, some thin connective tissue, one cover that should have been arrested at the border, and a story so barely present that people have spent half a century reverse-engineering a libretto Bowie plainly could not be bothered to write. Ziggy is supposedly an alien rock messiah, except perhaps he is a human receiving extraterrestrial messages, except perhaps none of that matters, except he rises, becomes famous, gets consumed by his own ego and audience, and dies, or gets torn apart by black-hole people, or rock-and-roll suicides himself, or something. Nobody knows because Bowie apparently looked at narrative continuity and said, “Darling, continuity is for heterosexuals.” Fine. Concept albums usually become unbearable the instant somebody starts taking attendance. What matters is that Bowie discovered an image capacious enough to swallow every song whether the song actually belonged there or not. That is different from writing a coherent narrative and much more interesting. Ziggy is less a character than a contaminated atmosphere. Once Bowie places the name on the sleeve, suddenly every cheap little rock-star gesture becomes evidence. Every sexual ambiguity becomes mythology. Every reference to fame sounds prophetic because we know what happened afterward. Every guitar chord Mick Ronson plays acquires silver boots. This is branding elevated into ontology, which is one of Bowie’s genuine superpowers. He understands that if you give an audience the right haircut, the right photograph and three suggestive nouns, they will do several million pounds’ worth of conceptual labor for free. People talk about Bowie as a master of reinvention, but what interests me more is how extraordinarily good he was at getting everybody else to finish the reinvention for him. Ziggy exists because the public agreed to hallucinate him. The hallucination was helped immeasurably by Mick fucking Ronson, who is the actual physical body of this record. Bowie supplies the face, voice, scenario, bisexual extraterrestrial theater and cheekbones sharp enough to open letters, but Ronson supplies weight. Listen to “Moonage Daydream,” which begins with Bowie declaring himself an alligator, a mama-papa coming for you, a space invader, and several other things that would sound like lyrics found written on the wall of a bus station bathroom if Ronson did not immediately make them feel carved into stone. The guitar tone is enormous without being sludge, bright enough to bite but thick enough to have hips. Then the arrangement starts expanding around him, strings climbing, saxophones blowing hot air into the ceiling, Bowie stretching vowels until “freak out” becomes less instruction than sexual weather, and Ronson eventually produces that long closing solo, one of the album’s rare moments where the whole Ziggy fiction stops feeling like Bowie putting on a very good coat and starts feeling genuinely cosmic. Not cosmic like Carl Sagan. Cosmic like someone put amphetamines in the Book of Revelation and gave it a Gibson Les Paul. That song gets to me bodily. The riff has thrust. There is no tasteful word for it and I do not want one. It comes through the speakers pelvis-first. Bowie’s vocal sits on top behaving like he has transcended ordinary sexual categorization, while Ronson underneath is doing something much more primitive, dragging the whole thing forward by the belt loops. Glam’s great trick was never simply androgyny. It was making masculinity so artificial that it became available for play. Bowie could put on makeup, dye his hair, wear a jumpsuit that makes his torso resemble a particularly elegant insect, sing about boys and girls and stars and himself with the pronouns all getting pleasantly slippery, and none of it weakened the rock phallus because Ronson was standing there making the guitar sound like the rock phallus had just discovered lipstick and was extremely pleased about it. That is considerably more interesting than the current museum version of Ziggy, where everybody behaves like Bowie descended in 1972 to personally invent queerness while Britain gasped into its tea. Britain had plenty of queer people in 1972. It had also only partially decriminalized sex between men in England and Wales five years earlier, under restrictions that would look fucking deranged now. Glam’s ambiguity lived inside that tension. Bowie’s famous public declarations about sexuality mattered because they were occurring in a culture where being queer could still wreck employment, housing, family, safety, everything, but Bowie’s ambiguity was also commercial theater, celebrity strategy, genuine desire, provocation, self-invention and bullshit all at once. Trying to separate those strands now is like trying to identify the original ingredients after somebody has baked a cake, eaten half of it, thrown it at Mick Jagger, and sold the remaining slice to the Victoria and Albert Museum. What I love is precisely that the performance will not sit still long enough to become morally tidy. Bowie does not present gender as inner truth waiting to be liberated. He presents it as wardrobe, gesture, appetite, angle, lighting, hair, rumor, voice, posture, commerce. That feels more modern to me than a lot of the reverent language subsequently built around him. Identity here is something you make while everybody watches, then they copy it, then you get bored and kill it. But the songs, the actual fucking songs, keep refusing to become as monumental as this interpretation wants them to be. “Soul Love” is lovely, featherweight, almost lazily seductive, with that saxophone curling around the vocal while Trevor Bolder’s bass keeps the thing moving beneath Bowie’s little anthropology of love. I like the looseness. The groove has air. Bowie sings the different kinds of love as though examining specimens under colored glass, maternal love, romantic love, religious love, stupid human attachment generally, and the arrangement never declares which one is meant to matter. Then “Moonage Daydream” kicks the door open and makes the preceding delicacy look like foreplay. That contrast is smart. But elsewhere the album keeps relying on songs whose charm depends heavily on the accumulated force of the persona. Remove Ziggy from “Star” and you have an enjoyable glam-rock number about wanting to become a rock star, precisely the sort of thing a thousand bands would later write after deciding becoming famous counted as metaphysics. “Hang On to Yourself” is better because the Spiders finally start playing like they have somewhere to be. The rhythm is impatient, compact, almost proto-punk in the way people enjoy saying after the future has already happened. The guitars chatter, the drums run, Bowie spits the lines instead of caressing them, and suddenly the album sounds less like a concept record than four people in a room who could plausibly make your drink fall off the table. Then there is “Starman,” which is probably impossible to hear innocently now because it has spent half a century being transformed from pop single into official state hymn of Wonder, Difference, Childhood, Space, David Bowie Memorialization and every commercial where a car drives through the desert while someone experiences Personal Transformation. The song survives this abuse better than it has any right to. That octave leap on “star-man” is such a shameless little piece of pop architecture, an instant opening in the ceiling, and the chorus has the melodic inevitability of something that seems obvious only because Bowie already wrote it. You can hear bits of “Over the Rainbow” in its upward yearning, you can hear old pop craft underneath the sci-fi lacquer, and that is Bowie all over. He is rarely the alien he claims to be. He is a magpie with fantastic tailoring. The future in Bowie is usually assembled from things sitting around the past, Anthony Newley, Jacques Brel, Little Richard, music hall, Warhol, science fiction paperbacks, Japanese fashion, gay clubs, mime for Christ’s sake. His genius is montage. He takes cultural material that should not coexist, puts it under the same orange hair, and waits until everybody decides the combination must have arrived from Mars. “Starman” is also where the fantasy of rescue works because Bowie keeps it small. The alien does not descend with commandments. He is hanging around the radio, reluctant to blow our minds. Kids hear him. Parents are horrified because parents in pop songs are contractually required to hate anything fun. It is stupid and perfect. The song understands that teenage utopia is not a political program. Teenage utopia is receiving one transmission your parents cannot decode. I never needed the transmission specifically to come from outer space. Sometimes it came from a record, sometimes another weird girl, sometimes a badly compressed video on the internet, sometimes some artifact made twenty years before I was born that suddenly said, there are other freaks, congratulations, unfortunately they are also idiots. That mechanism still works in “Starman,” even after the song has been bronzed by canonization. For three minutes, Bowie remembers that salvation needs a hook. And then we hit “It Ain’t Easy,” where the record turns into a hitchhiker who has climbed into the wrong car. I fucking hate the sequencing more than I hate the song itself. Ron Davies wrote it, plenty of people recorded it, Bowie had already cut it during the Hunky Dory period, and here it sits at the end of side one like somebody wandered onto the stage carrying an entirely different musical. It has its virtues. Ronson’s guitar crunches nicely. Bowie gets to do that strangled upper-register thing in the chorus. The gospel-rock structure has some muscle. But on an album whose later reputation depends so heavily on the idea of coherent persona and world-building, sticking this fairly generic blues-gospel cover in the middle is hilarious. Imagine Sgt. Pepper suddenly including a competent cover of “Mustang Sally” because they had one lying around. This is where the myth and artifact get into a fistfight and the artifact wins. Ziggy Stardust was not delivered on tablets. It was assembled like records are assembled, from sessions, available material, commercial judgment, momentum, accidents. I like knowing that. It makes the album human again. Unfortunately the human decision was still bad. Side two is where the Ziggy mythology finally begins to acquire enough concentration to justify the fucking title. “Lady Stardust” is one of Bowie’s sweetest songs precisely because the theatrical language starts pointing toward tenderness rather than spectacle. The piano is simple, almost old-fashioned, and Bowie sings about this ambiguous beautiful performer from the position of someone watching, admiring, possibly desiring, possibly recognizing himself, probably all three because Bowie never met a mirror he could not convert into a love triangle. The line between attraction and identification gets deliciously useless. Do I want that person, do I want to be that person, do I want other people to want me the way I want that person? Congratulations, you have discovered half of queer adolescence and approximately seventy percent of fashion. Bowie gets this without announcing it. The ambiguity is in the grammar of looking. “Lady Stardust” does more for Ziggy as a figure than half the supposed concept because it lets him exist as an object of fascination before “Ziggy Stardust” converts him into biography. That title track is probably the record’s cleanest piece of rock mythology, which means it has also inspired several generations of people to misread being in a band as the Trojan War. I tease because the song earns it. Ronson’s opening guitar figure is magnificent, not complicated, not trying to impress anyone, just a descending shape with enough harmonic unease to immediately suggest glamour curdling into resentment. Bowie tells Ziggy’s rise and collapse from the band’s perspective, which is the smart move. Celebrity is always more interesting from three feet to the side. Suddenly the messiah is also the asshole hogging the light. “Making love with his ego” remains a tremendous phrase because it gets the physical comedy of narcissism exactly right. Ego masturbation is the central erotic act of rock stardom, and Bowie knows because obviously he fucking knows. The song’s greatest trick is that Ziggy can be Bowie, Bolan, Hendrix, Vince Taylor, Iggy, some invented composite, your singer, your girlfriend, yourself at 2:30 in the morning explaining your artistic destiny to somebody who desperately wants the Uber to arrive. The mythology works because its details are archetypal enough to be portable and trashy enough to remain rock and roll. “Suffragette City” is stupider and more fun. This is not an insult. Stupidity is one of rock’s primary renewable resources, and any critic who cannot enjoy a song for being gloriously dumb should be forced to listen to progressive rock concept albums about agricultural taxation until they develop humility. The guitar bangs, the piano hammers away, the sax gets shoved into the walls, Bowie yelps “wham bam thank you ma’am” like he personally discovered casual sex that afternoon, and for three minutes the record quits worrying about becoming a cultural landmark and behaves like something you might actually blast too loudly. Even here the gender play keeps leaking around the song’s supposedly heterosexual swagger. “Henry” is being told to get lost because a woman is coming over, except this is Bowie and the entire performance is so lacquered, camp and knowingly theatrical that straightforward masculine bragging has already dissolved by the time it reaches the microphone. Bowie can sing a macho line without restoring macho solidity. Everything comes wearing quotation marks, but crucially the quotation marks are drunk. That quality is why I am less impressed by the solemn Bowie cult than by Bowie himself. Bowie was funny. The man understood ridiculousness. Ziggy looks incredible partly because he looks absurd. The costumes are not timeless elegance, they are aggressively specific acts of visual insanity. The hair alone resembles a fox dying heroically in a chemical fire. That is good. Glam understood something subsequent respectable culture repeatedly forgets, namely that transformation without ridiculousness is just personal branding. You have to risk looking fucking stupid. The Top of the Pops “Starman” performance became epochal not because Bowie floated down from heaven but because he put an arm around Mick Ronson, looked into the camera like he knew exactly which children were watching, and made alien sexuality look less threatening than the adults’ panic about it. Yet the entire thing also contains the inherent comedy of two skinny English men dressed like interplanetary prostitutes miming to a pop song on BBC television. Sublime and ridiculous are roommates. Stop evicting one. The album itself sometimes wants sublime status without supplying enough ridiculous life underneath it, which is where I stall out. Ken Scott’s production is strong, clear and muscular without turning the Spiders into an arena-rock refrigerator, but it can also make the record feel smaller than the legend. The guitars are not enormous by later standards. The drums are often dry and straightforward. The bass is functional rather than fetishized. There is piano, sax, strings when needed, but the basic sonics remain recognizably early-seventies rock, not some impossible Martian technology. Again, that should be liberating. Bowie was not beaming transmissions from Alpha Centauri. He had a very good band. But once the extraterrestrial glitter gets stripped away, I am left asking whether every song deserves the reverence, and several absolutely do not. The record has too many patches where I admire the construction while my pulse continues filling out paperwork. “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” rescues the ending by abandoning subtlety so violently that subtlety should probably file a restraining order. Bowie starts alone with acoustic guitar, singing about aging as though twenty-five were the final stage of terminal decay, which is adorable. “You’re too old to lose it, too young to choose it,” he says at an age when I would now regard somebody as a fucking larva. Rock music has always been catastrophically bad at imagining adulthood because its commercial mythology depends on selling teenagers the idea that turning thirty constitutes spiritual death. Bowie was already smart enough to see through many rock myths while remaining completely infected by this one. Yet the song works because it keeps expanding past the premise. The arrangement grows, strings and horns climb in, the tempo seems to tighten around him, and suddenly he is no longer singing about rock stardom or suicide or Ziggy with any useful specificity. He is singing directly at the lonely bastard listening. “You’re not alone.” There is a reason people carried that out of the record. The sentiment is nearly embarrassingly simple, but Bowie sings it like simplicity has finally defeated cleverness. This man who spent the whole album constructing masks, roles, aliens, performers, stars and mirrors ends by grabbing the listener by the shoulders. The vocal gets huge. The arrangement gets ridiculous. He repeats himself because sometimes repetition is what you do when you are trying to get through to somebody whose brain has become a locked bathroom door. That is the emotional payoff the album keeps being credited with having all the way through, when really it earns it in bursts. “Five Years” earns it. “Moonage Daydream” earns it. “Starman” earns it through pop craft. “Lady Stardust” earns it quietly. The title track earns it through myth compressed into riff and resentment. “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” earns it by taking all the theatrical machinery and finally pointing it outward. The rest is often extremely enjoyable scaffolding. Which is enough. More than enough, usually. I do not need every canonized album to rearrange my organs. But Ziggy Stardust has spent so long being treated as one of rock’s sacred organs that encountering the actual thing produces a funny disappointment. I expected a cathedral and found a very good club with extraordinary lighting. The cathedral was built afterward by everyone who came through the doors. Punk kids took bits. Goths took bits. New Romantics took entire fucking truckloads. Queer kids took the permission structure. Indie boys took Bowie’s cheekbones and somehow made them heterosexual again, an achievement of scientific importance. Lady Gaga took the transformations. Suede took the sexual languor. Every singer who realized identity could be stagecraft rather than confession owes something to Bowie, directly or through descendants. But influence accumulates outside the grooves. Put the needle down and there are eleven tracks, not the twentieth century changing costumes in real time. Maybe that is the perversely appealing thing about the record now. Its greatest achievement occurred partly in people’s heads. Bowie supplied enough material for the fantasy to reproduce itself. The songs became costumes and the costumes became songs. Ziggy became more coherent in memory than he ever was on vinyl. A generation of listeners filled the gaps because gaps are erotic. Explain everything and the fantasy dies. Bowie understood this instinctively. He gives you a name, orange hair, a dead world, a starman, a messianic rock singer, some ambiguous fucking, ego, fame, collapse, suicide, and then walks away before anyone can ask whether Act Two is missing. I am still less seduced than history insists I should be. There are stretches where I am having a perfectly good time while waiting for the masterpiece to return from the bathroom. Then Ronson hits that riff in “Moonage Daydream,” or Bowie’s voice tears open at the end of “Five Years,” or that stupid heavenly octave lifts “Starman” right through the ceiling, and for a few minutes the mythology stops being somebody else’s nostalgia and starts operating on me directly. That is enough to keep me from dismissing the cult, and not enough to make me join it. I will come to the service. I will sing several hymns. I will absolutely make fun of the priest’s outfit. The priest, fortunately, would have understood.