His performances as Ziggy-a star, but also an alien “ Starman“-created a cult around him that he sustained for over a year, before he abruptly dispatched Ziggy in a “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide.” But rather than identify with it himself, Bowie projected the music onto the alter ego of an extra-terrestrial rock star. Recorded in late 1971 and early 1972, ten of its eleven songs were his own compositions, featuring a harder rock sound than he had recently favored. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (1972), his fifth album, changed everything: his music, his persona, and his position in the mass media. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.īowie persevered with the combination of death and doppelgänger motifs, and when he abandoned the shibboleths of expressive authenticity that the counterculture prized to create Ziggy Stardust, the progress of his future career was assured. Bowie recounts how his performances with a mask he finds in a junk store become so popular that he is invited to appear at the London Palladium-where the mask strangles him.ĭavid Bowie, shooting a video for “Rebel Rebel” on AVRO’s TopPop, a Dutch television show, in 1974, after he killed his famed alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust. Thomson), featuring the recent hit, “Space Oddity,” and seven more Bowie compositions, including “ The Mask,” in which Bowie mimes in accompaniment to his spoken voice-over story.
The same year, Bowie’s manager, Kenneth Pitt, produced a promotional film, Love You till Tuesday (Malcolm J. Here, Bowie haunts an artist who is painting a portrait of him, driving the artist to such a point of distraction that he stabs his inspiration to death. And so, when his early musical efforts failed to attract attention, he turned to mime and acting, gaining small roles in several film projects, including one in a short experimental melodrama, The Image(Michael Armstrong, 1969). Fey Dylanesque folk ditties performed by a long-haired waif in a dress-albeit, he insisted, a man’s dress-had few links to late 1960s cultural touchstones. For the previous 45 years, Bowie’s public fabrication and annihilation of alter egos always aspired to such visually and aurally innovative media spectacles.Īfter his early mod dabbling with the blues, his first rejection of the period’s rock ’n’ roll personae was met with little success. And, even though he was himself absent from it, his death and the music and videos in which he dramatized it together precipitated the most extensive media storm of his career. “ Lazarus,” the third track sung from heaven where he was as free as a bluebird, appeared to announce his rebirth into yet another of the series of personae he inhabited throughout his career. On 8 January 2016, on his 69th birthday and two days before he died, David Bowie released Blackstar, an album replete with images of death, but also hints of the possibility of its transcendence.
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