What You’re Listening to: David Bowie’s ‘The Rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’

Editor's Note: As today is the anniversary of the death of legendary musician David Bowie, we re-present Victor D. Infante's retroview of Bowie's album, “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” originally published in 2012.

Someone, probably my wife — once joked that Keith Richards is David Bowie’s picture of Dorian Gray. Richards just seems to become more and more grizzled, while Bowie remains eerily handsome and elegant. So, naturally, it was something of a shock to learn that Bowie turned 65 on Sunday.

I started listening to Bowie my freshman year in high school, after older friends introduced me to songs such as “Changes” and “Young Americans.” The first CD I picked up was “Let’s Dance,” because it had only been out a bit more than a year, and “Modern Love” and “China Girl” were still on the radio. (I didn’t know yet that the latter song was co-written by Iggy Pop, who had recorded it earlier. I actually didn’t know who Iggy Pop was. I would learn.) Infatuated, I quickly began working through Bowie’s catalog — which, conveniently, Rykodisc had begun re-releasing. It didn’t take me too long to get to my one true object of Bowie obsession: “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.”

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It was love at first listen.

It starts with the end of the world and it ends with a rock ’n’ roll suicide, and what lies between is a meditation on sex, drugs, fame and — most importantly — what it means to be alien. My 14-year-old self was infatuated with the apocalyptic science fiction of it all, with the very idea of the rock star casting himself in some cinematic persona and creating a work of art from that alien perspective. I didn’t know that that sort of thing had been done before, nor would I have particularly cared. It spoke to me. It was weird and I was weird. It was cool and I very, very much wanted to be cool. I was hooked.

My earliest favorites on the album were, in retrospect, probably the obvious ones: “Moonage Daydream” and “Suffragette City.” The former’s lyrics were surreal, and yet they created a sensation of the world being bigger and holding more possibility than it often seemed to. “I’m an alligator/I’m a momma-poppa coming for you/I’m a space invader/I’ll be a rock ’n’ rolling (expletive) for you.” For “Suffragette City,” the guitar hook was just so slick and catchy, the whole tune moving at stunning velocity without losing its cool. And who doesn’t love that “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” near the end? It didn’t much matter that I had little idea what the song meant. Or, really, what any of the songs meant. “Art can be appreciated before it is fully understood,” as T.S. Eliot once said.

To be fair, a lot of Bowie’s lyrics really aren’t as deep as they seemed to me as a teenager, although I still adore them. But there are some undeniable moments of poetry, there, particularly in “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” and “Five Years.” With the latter, with Stardust playing voyeur watching the news of the planet’s imminent demise, and as they wail and love, he finds them beautiful. “Suicide,” on the other hand, is that song’s counterpart: Its apocalypse is tiny, and glamorous in a noirish way. “Time takes a cigarette/puts it on your mouth/you pull on a finger/then another finger/then a cigarette.”

It’s the self-inflicted death of excess, and Bowie brings the detail down tight, before offering his persona one last open hand: “Oh, no, love/you’re not alone/you’re watching yourself/but you’re too unfair.”

It doesn’t matter. We learn earlier, in the song “Ziggy Stardust,” that “when the kids had killed the man/I had to break up the band.”

Both songs get harder to listen to the older I get. There’s an escalating sense of loss throughout the album, of something wonderful and magical lost. “So where were the Spiders/while the fly tried to break our bones?” Where, indeed? I’ve asked myself that question once, and not just about Ziggy.

Ultimately, “Ziggy Stardust” is about transformation, about the idea that everything about you can be fluid. That was an appealing thought at 14. It still is, really. But as I get older, I can see that what makes the album so remarkable is that Bowie presented both sides of that transformation, the glamour and the shadow, without judgment. He never argues that the transformation doesn’t come without a price, and he never argues that the price isn’t worth it. Instead, he tells a story — tragic, outrageous at times, but also beautiful. He tells a story about the world ending. And then it does. And in between, he tells us, the world was beautiful.

“And Lady Stardust sang her songs/of darkness and disgrace.”

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: What You’re Listening to: David Bowie’s ‘The Rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’