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5-Minute Time Warp With Caity: Pt 2 - Ziggy Stardust
Ziggy Stardust is the ninth track of the 1972 David Bowie record "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars". The song is ranked #277 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time".
The record is based on the story of a rock star named "Ziggy Stardust", the human manifestation of an alien being who attempts to give humanity a message of hope in the last five years of its existence. Ziggy Stardust is protrayed as the cliche rock star: sexually promiscuous, androgynous, with a penchant for drugs who is ultimately destroyed by his own excesses of drugs and sex, as well as by the fans he inspired. The character of Ziggy Stardust was inspired by British Rock 'n Roll Singer Vince Taylor (The Playboys) who Bowie met after a bad breakdown. Bowie was convinced that Vince Taylor was a cross between a god and an alien.
The concept of "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" is rather trippy in it's own right, so I'm going to quote David Bowie in his Rolling Stone interview with William S. Burroughs, if it's all the same to you.
The time is five years to go before the end of the earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have lost all touch with reality and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock-and-roll band and the kids no longer want rock-and-roll. There's no electricity to play it. Ziggy's adviser tells him to collect news and sing it, 'cause there is no news. So Ziggy does this and there is terrible news. 'All the young dudes' is a song about this news. It's no hymn to the youth as people thought. It is completely the opposite...
The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I've made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage...
Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a Starman, so he writes 'Starman', which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch onto it immediately...The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don't have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black hole jumping. Their whole life is travelling from universe to universe. In the stage show, one of them resembles Brando, another one is a Black New Yorker. I even have one called Queenie, the Infinite Fox...Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starmen. He takes himself up to the incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make them real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song 'Rock 'n' roll suicide'. As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the infinites take his elements and make themselves visible."
The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I've made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage...
Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a Starman, so he writes 'Starman', which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch onto it immediately...The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don't have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black hole jumping. Their whole life is travelling from universe to universe. In the stage show, one of them resembles Brando, another one is a Black New Yorker. I even have one called Queenie, the Infinite Fox...Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starmen. He takes himself up to the incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make them real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song 'Rock 'n' roll suicide'. As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the infinites take his elements and make themselves visible."
The record reached number 5 in the UK and seventy-five in the US on the charts, and was eventually certified platinum and gold in the UK and US, repsectively. The single "Ziggy Stardust" itself has been covered by many many bands, including Def Leppard, Exploding Boy, Guns N' Roses, Of Montreal, Vice Squad, The Gourds, and even AFI. So to wrap this up, I'll give you a modernized version of Ziggy Stardust, played on "AOL Sessions Under Cover" by AFI.
Thanks for joining me in the past again, keep your eyes peeled for more blasts to the past with me at a future date!
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