![]() “The songwriting is incredible … loved every single song on the album.” Judas Priest’s Rob Halford remembers seeing Bowie perform as Ziggy Stardust in 1973, praising his conviction to become and perform as the character. ![]() “Listening to was a bit like going to college, like the Beatles,” Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell told Rolling Stone. Ziggy Stardust ushered in glam rock and opened the door for visual and musical experimentation that would impact and influence acts as diverse as Eurythmics, Kanye West, Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Moby, Nine Inch Nails and Lady Gaga. It was a rock star as a changeling, adapting to and interpreting the evolving world, filtering then transforming his look and music into something new. The character was a hybrid of what 'rock music was and could become'īowie glamorized and subverted the notion of a rock star, becoming a different version of himself armed with a new look and new sound. “And some of us, I think, us small, pompous arty ones… probably read too much George Steiner and kind of got the idea that we were entering to this kind of post-culture age and that we’d better do something postmodernist - quickly, before somebody else did.”ĭavid Bowie poses for a portrait dressed as Ziggy Stardust in a hotel room in New York City, 1973 Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images And I think we kind of wanted to go somewhere else,” Bowie said. “Well, I guess the simple one-liner is that myself and my mates and I guess a certain contingent of the musicians in London at the beginning of the ‘70s were fed up with denim and the hippies. Quizzed about the genesis of his creation during a 2002 NPR Fresh Air interview, an amused Bowie cited a more general dissatisfaction with the then status quo. Having met during the mid-1960s amongst the London club scene, Bowie described that Jesus Christ and aliens preoccupied Taylor, who was “not playing with a full deck at all.”īiographers assert Lou Reed and Marc Bolan as influences, alongside Iggy Pop. In a 1996 interview with the BBC Bowie said real-life failed rocker Vince Taylor played a part in his most iconic theatrical persona. ![]() Hailed as a messiah, Stardust succumbs to the attractions of fame and fortune, ultimately dying at the end of Bowie’s rock opera concept album.īowie sought inspiration for his creation in disparate sources, all the better to confront and defy convention. Stardust was a bisexual rock star from another planet sent to Earth ahead of an impending apocalyptic disaster to deliver a message of hope, according to the album narrative. ![]() And that was what was needed at the time.” Ziggy Stardust was Bowie's way of rebelling against the normīowie’s alter-ego creation erupted onto the music scene in 1972 with the release of his fifth studio album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. “I mean, my plastic rock & roller was much more plastic than anybody’s. “What I did with my Ziggy Stardust was package a totally credible, plastic rock ‘n’ roll singer - much better than the Monkees could ever fabricate,” Bowie told Rolling Stone of the fictional, gender-fluid, alien rock star. Though he would abruptly shed the persona when much of the world was only just discovering Stardust’s appeal, Bowie’s creation would continue to inform his own music and that of other famous rockers throughout his career and beyond his death in 2016 at age 69. Outlandish, confronting and musically gifted, the character of Ziggy Stardust signaled the arrival of David Bowie as a rock star capable of transcending musical genres and inverting the common perception of how a performer should look and behave.
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