Borrowing heavily from
Marc Bolan's
glam rock and the future shock of
A Clockwork Orange,
David Bowie reached back to the heavy
rock of
The Man Who Sold the World for
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Constructed as a loose concept album about an androgynous alien
rock star named
Ziggy Stardust, the story falls apart quickly, yet
Bowie's fractured, paranoid lyrics are evocative of a decadent, decaying future, and the music echoes an apocalyptic, nuclear dread. Fleshing out the off-kilter metallic mix with fatter guitars, genuine
pop songs, string sections, keyboards, and a cinematic flourish,
Ziggy Stardust is a glitzy array of riffs, hooks, melodrama, and style and the logical culmination of
glam.
Mick Ronson plays with a maverick flair that invigorates rockers like
"Suffragette City," "Moonage Daydream," and
"Hang Onto Yourself," while
"Lady Stardust," "Five Years," and
"Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" have a grand sense of staged drama previously unheard of in
rock & roll. And that self-conscious sense of theater is part of the reason why
Ziggy Stardust sounds so foreign.
Bowie succeeds not in spite of his pretensions but because of them, and
Ziggy Stardust -- familiar in structure, but alien in performance -- is the first time his vision and execution met in such a grand, sweeping fashion. [
Rise and Fall was remastered and re-released on CD in 2105.] ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine