I came to David Bowie, like so many others, by watching his videos on television in the early 1980s. It was fascinating to bump into the heroes of your friends' older brothers and retrace your steps. Rummage through old record stores, take advantage of the offers, cassettes for just over two euros today. Right away, I had a second greatest hits and the Ziggy Stardust. The Scary Monsters recorded on TDK tape and Modern Love as a maxi single, with a live version on its B-side.
Ziggy Stardust played a thousand times on the player and each song was a suit tailored to you, a coded message addressed to you and only you. The King of Rare speaking to you from a speaker in your bedroom. You were looking for all the data you could in the cheap covers of the RCA cassettes. 1972: the year of Ziggy and his Spiders from Mars. You stole titles and verses, attitudes and references. With Bowie you had fewer qualms about crime than with others. As Godard said, the important thing is not where you take something but where you put it later.
Today you know more about all that, but Bowie Planet, like so many others, was full of treasures. Yes, with one click, we find out more things that cloud what we knew before with our guts, with what you mistranslated from English, you listened to other insiders and your feverish imagination made you discover or invent. Thus we know that the relative success of Space Oddity in 1969 and Changes a year later was insufficient for its creator's oceanic ambition to be a superstar. Bowie felt like he was running late to every party, and to some extent the feeling was true. Even his virtues as a candidate for stardom worked against him. It was obvious that his thing was not the immaculate rock priesthood from the cradle, but an innate gift for opportunism, simulation and lucidity in recognizing the talent of others... to pass it off as his own. Our hero was so desperate to hit all the keys and send messages and tributes to so many, that the good news on his albums went down the drain. But at the beginning of 1972 everything changed.
At 23 Heddon Street, a London alley perpendicular to Regent Street, landed from an alien planet, Ziggy Stardust, Bowie's first and most successful mask. The move consisted of making the dispersion of a trunk found in a discount store an ambitious total work. Kabuki theater makeup, platform shoes, pretend pathos in a concept album about the first alien, pansexual, messianic rock star, his arrival, rise and fall. Musically, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
The single that was released from the album was Starman, which has aged worse than other jewels such as Lady Stardust, Five years, Ziggy Stardust or the one that closes the album: Rock'n'roll suicide, which was also the culmination of the successful concerts they gave Bowie's Spiders from Mars (Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Mick Woodmansey) until final closure on July 3, 1973 in the last of their concerts at the Hammersmith Odeon, death of Ziggy, crucified in the Golgotha of rock stars and holding time for Bowie's next mask, Aladdin Sane.
Recorded on February 4, Rock'n'roll suicide collected the slogan that this pluperfect work needed with the precise dose of quality, commerciality, parody and adolescent enthusiasm. It begins with David's acoustic strumming, and a definitive first line (“Time takes a cigarrette”) that the daring and unprovable legend attributes to a plundering of verses by Manuel Machado (“Life is a cigar”). If it were a piano, we would have already heard this Bowie ballad, but here it appears novel and strangely sincere. The rhythmic base arrives, sustained by the metal until the voice itself escalates in emotion and ecstasy towards the operatic apotheosis of the theme, with a string finish and curtain fall. It is evident that our favorite thief had listened well to Brel (“You're not alone!/Gimme your hands!”) and the paroxysm of the Bowie-Ziggy finale constitutes a sort of redemption for all of us, with an orchestral finale chuca That alien came to save us and fulfilled his mission.
