For though “He was alright, the band was altogether” (sic), still “People stared at the makeup on his face/Laughed at his long black hair, his animal grace.” The pervading bittersweet melancholy that wells out of the contradictions and that Bowie beautifully captures with one of the album’s more direct vocals conjures the picture of a painted harlequin under the spot-light of a deserted theater in the darkest hour of the night. Powerman that delves deep into a matter close to David’s heart: What’s it all about to be a rock & roll star? It begins with the slow, fluid “Lady Stardust,” a song in which currents of frustration and triumph merge in an overriding desolation. Side two is the soul of the album, a kind of psychological equivalent of Lola vs.
Ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars series#
It emerges as a series of concise vignettes designed strictly for the ear. Cooper has shown, just doesn’t cut it), but through employment of broadly mannered styles and deliveries, a boggling variety of vocal nuances that provide the program with the necessary depth, a verbal acumen that is now more economic and no longer clouded by storms of psychotic, frenzied music, and, finally, a thorough command of the elements of rock & roll. The news here is that he’s managed to get that sensibility down on vinyl, not with an attempt at pseudo-visualism (which, as Mr.
It’s all tied up with the one aspect of David Bowie that sets him apart from both the exploiters of transvestitism and writer/performers of comparable tallent - his theatricality. Flamboyance and outrageousness are inseparable from that campy image of his, both in the Bacall and Garbo stages and in his new butch, street-crawler appearance that has him looking like something out of the darker pages of City of Night. Which is not to say that he hasn’t had a great time with it. To do either would involve an artistically fatal degree of compromise. And which is bound to get worse.įor although Lady Stardust himself has probably had more to do with androgony’s current fashionableness in rock than any other individual, he has never made his sexuality anything more than a completely natural and integral part of his public self, refusing to lower it to the level of gimmick but never excluding it from his image and craft. Nicholas’ trio of feathered, sequined Barbie dolls. Upon the release of David Bowie’s most thematically ambitious, musically coherent album to date, the record in which he unites the major strengths of his previous work and comfortably reconciles himself to some apparently inevitable problems, we should all say a brief prayer that his fortunes are not made to rise and fall with the fate of the “drag-rock” syndrome - that thing that’s manifesting itself in the self-conscious quest for decadence which is all the rage at the moment in trendy Hollywood, in the more contrived area of Alice Cooper’s presentation, and, way down in the pits, in such grotesqueries as Queen, Nick St.