As much as I love David Bowie, I’ve never spent any time with what is widely considered his definitive album and one of the seminal albums of the Glam Rock movement.
As I’ve understood it, Ziggy Stardust tells the story of a rock and roll space messiah who comes to Earth with a message of peace and love in its last five years of existence (I’ve started the album enough times to know the first track).
But where the album really makes its mark is in its musicianship. While he had dabbled with hard rock briefly on The Man who Sold the World (another I’m not familiar with), at this point in his career Bowie had spent most of his time in psychedelic folk and pop forms, twelve string strumming his way through the other-worldly Space Oddity and bouncing between pop genres on Hunky Dory. On Ziggy, it’s all electric guitar and ambition.
“Five Years” is a melodramatic piano ballad that sounds like an alien trying to cover John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. “Starman” is a grandiose rock gospel song with acoustic guitar, electric guitar solos, and a full orchestra. “Suffragette City” has all the electricity and passion of early rock and roll turned to eleven. “Star” takes as many turns as could possibly fit in its two and a half minutes, flitting between pianboogie-woogieie and balladeering in the space between a verse and a chorus.
And this being glam rock, every performance is delightfully over the top, eschewing restraint for the joy of the show. And this being David Bowie, he makes some great music while he does it.