David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars Review

Overall Rating

With "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars", David Bowie, in 1971, created what after thirty-six years is still acclaimed as a "concept-album".
Even if this definition is not totally correct, it is easy to realize the reason of this die-hard misunderstanding.
After three album ("David Bowie", "The man who sold the world", "Hunky Dory"), in which the main theme was a clear representation of his self in a perfect "Camp" taste, with a large excursion in the cabaret world, Mr. Bowie wrote an album who has been conceived as a comic.
Under the strong influence of Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" (as eveyone can see, having a look at the photographs inside the cover), Bowie described an apocalyptic vision of a future world using every song like a stripe, giving voice a different characters playing a part in this un-linear story.
The messianic figure of Ziggy, intended as the main alter ego of the author, moved his firsts dance-steps on the stage, when Bowie planned the show with the help of Lindsay Kemp as a circus arena, giving birth at the "pantomime rock" gender.
The aim of Bowie was to let the sound and the imagine to fit together, and he realized it in a lucid delirium of mime, science fiction and kabuki theatre.
Anyway, the album is a piece of a seventies glam taste, original for sure, and provocative with the label "To be played at the maximum volume", like a sort of "anti-parental advisor".
The parable of Ziggy, as a metaphor of the sense of alienation of the actual (still actual) world, and the prevalence of the theatrical aspects and an affected manner, sometimes used as a proof of the low quality of this product, cannot cover in total what is good in this album:
the lyrics, with that visionary approach and the neologistics nonsense, are an exemple of a way to write the Bowie were still using in his recent albums, and even if now we can only listen at this album with a nostalgic feeling of a Ziggy never seen on the stage, the power of it and the "concept" that, if not inside it, is all around it, let us still participate at that mass phenomenon that "The Rise and Fall.." album and live as been.
So, let's follow the label advice, and give your hand to Ziggy, to let him live and sing his prophecies of a new century already came:

"Oh no love! You're not alone
No matter what or who you've been
No matter when or where you've seen
All the knives seem to lacerate your brain
I've had my share, I'll help you with the pain

You're not alone

Just turn on with me and you're not alone
Let's turn on with me and you're not alone
Let's turn on and be not alone
Gimme your hands cause you're wonderful

Oh gimme your hands."