The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars (1972)

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars is, without a doubt, one of my favorite albums of all time.  It's not an album I grew up with exactly; I'd maybe heard the songs from it a half dozen times or so by the time I was a teenager, as no one in my house was a huge Bowie fan.  I rediscovered it in college and then it jumped into full rotation in my 20's, and the obsession stuck.

Tomes have been written regarding this album, and people far more qualified then I have dissected and analyzed it, so you have an unending number of resources available to you if you've never heard Ziggy, or if you have and are itching to get to the bottom of it.

There's a couple of different ways that I have viewed Ziggy over the years (which is one of the reasons it's such an amazing album to me).  There's 1. Bowie as marketer:  Ziggy is an entirely manufactured persona, meant to finally break him into the 70's rock and roll mainstream after years of nearly, but not quite, making it 2. Bowie as chameleon: Bowie was a master at adopting various conventions and genres.  A lesser celestial we would call a "poser" for even attempting such things, but Bowie is beyond reproach. 3. Bowie as artist: Ziggy pushes the art world's boundaries, even today, so I can't even imagine how the full effect this album/stage show/fashion show must have had at the height of it's power.  

At it's core though, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars is a science fiction/glam rock concept album that tells the story of an androgynous Rock and Roll messiah, who brings a message of love and hope (and rock and roll excess), told to him by aliens in the final days of Earth.  Told from varying perspectives, the album tracks the course of Ziggy from the dooming of the Earth to his end, as (with all great Messiahs) he's eventually killed by his own followers.

Widely recognized as one of the greatest rock and roll albums of all time (see Rolling Stone, Time, The Guardian, Pitchfork, etc...), it is also one of two crowning glam rock masterpieces that arrived in 1972 (the other being The Slider by T-Rex). 

I love each and every song on this album, but the high points for me are "Starman" (that guitar riff never fails to send chills up my spine), the glam magnificence of "Hang Onto Yourself" and "Suffragette City", and the classic "Rock n Roll Suicide".

Enjoy!

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Side One:

01 Five Years

"News guy wept and told us/Earth was really dying/Cried so much his face was wet/then I knew he was not lying."

02 Soul Love

"All I have is my love of love/and love is not loving"

03 Moonage Daydream

"The church of man, love, is such a holy place to be"

04 Starman

"That weren't no DJ/that was hazy cosmic jive"

05 It Ain't Easy

"It ain't easy to get to heaven/when you're going down"

Side Two:

06 Lady Stardust

"People stared/at the makeup on his face/Laughed at his long black hair/his animal grace"

07 Star

"I could play the wild mutation/as a rock & roll star"

08 Hang Onto Yourself

"Well the bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar/You're the Blessed/We're the Spiders From Mars"

09 Ziggy Stardust

"Just the beer light to guide us/So we bitched about his fans and should we crush his sweet hands?"

10 Suffragette City

"Ohh, Wham bam thank ya ma'am!"

11 Rock n Roll Suicide

"Oh no love! You're not alone"

David Bowie And The Story Of Ziggy Stardust (BBC Documentary)

"Oh, the media monkeys and their junky junkies will invite you to the plastic pantomime, throw their invites away."

Seu Jorge's covers of Ziggy Stardust era David Bowie tunes for the Wes Anderson film "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" are also amazing.