"Till There Was Rock, You Only Had God": Ziggy Stardust and Rock 'N' Roll as Religion

[rusty_halo]

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I’m about as atheist you can get. The only thing that’s ever moved me in the same way that I hear other people talk about religion is music.

So it’s no wonder that David Bowie’s album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars grabbed me completely. Ziggy Stardust is rock ‘n’ roll as modern myth: rock ‘n’ roll as the religion of now.

Now that I’ve listened to Bowie’s entire 1970s oeuvre, I was going to write a post summarizing my thoughts on each album. But I realized I need to devote an entire post to Ziggy Stardust first, because there’s just so much to say about it.

Hunky Dory

Hunky Dory, the album which precedes Ziggy Stardust, sets the stage for Ziggy in a lot of ways. (Hunky Dory is a brilliant album in itself--I'm not trying to imply that it's a mere prelude to Ziggy--but I think it's integral to understanding how Ziggy Stardust came to be.) Hunky Dory's sound is far more restrained, piano driven, and folky, and its lyrics are more contemplative and ambiguous. It's almost as if Bowie was getting his doubts out of his system before proceeding full speed ahead with the rush of Ziggy. The core themes explored on Hunky Dory are creative inspiration--how to achieve it, and the fear of losing it--and how to realize your full potential as a human being. It's an album written by someone in his early 20s trying to figure out his place in the world and what to do with his life. And, clearly, he'd been reading a lot of Nietzsche and listening to a lot of rock music!

So we get "Changes," which is something of a description (Bowie had already gone through several transformations, from mod to folk rocker) but more of a prediction (he had a hell of a lot more changes to come!) Its tone is an odd mix of anthemic and wistful--Bowie criticizes the older generation for leaving "us up to our necks in it" and celebrates the "children" trying to "change their worlds," but also seems wary of impermanence and the passage of time, recognizing that it will effect him and his generation just as it's effecting the older generation that he criticizes.

The generational theme recurs in a darker way in "Oh! You Pretty Things," where Bowie warns that "homo sapiens have outgrown their use," that parents "gotta make way for the homo superior," their children who are "the start of a coming race." This song is genius in large part due to the contrast of its beautiful and unusual poppy melody with its unexpectedly dark lyrics--if you didn't speak the language you'd never guess that he's singing about cracks in the sky and the coming of nightmares.

The generational theme also appears in "Song for Bob Dylan," in which the narrator basically calls out Dylan for abandoning his role as leader. Bowie recognizes Dylan's power: "You sat behind a million pair of eyes / and told them how they saw" and seems quite sincere as he exhorts "Give us back our unity / Give us back our family." It's important to remember that Bowie was not yet famous when he wrote this; he'd had a minor hit with "Space Oddity" years before, but hadn't gone anywhere since and was basically regarded as a one-hit wonder (if he was regarded at all). But considering Bowie's subsequent actions, the subtext here is interesting: Bowie recognizes Dylan's power and, if Dylan doesn't want it, Bowie is already thinking of filling the role himself.

The other theme here is creative inspiration. Who is "the same old painted lady / from the brow of a superbrain"? Athena born from the brow of Zeus? The struggle for creativity is tied to the struggle of the individual to realize his full potential; the theme recurs throughout but is most apparent in "Quicksand": Bowie describes himself as "a mortal with the potential of a superman" who is "tethered to the logic of homo sapien / can't take my eyes from the great salvation / of bullshit faith" and is "sinking in the quicksand of my thought." I think this sense of the struggle to move beyond your normal self and achieve your full potential also informs the choice to cover "Fill Your Heart," which exhorts "Fear is in your head, only in your head / So forget your head, and you'll be free." (It's interesting that several descriptions of Bowie at the time describe him as shy--there's a great quote in one of the books I read describing David as kind of boring and Angie as the interesting one!)

Loneliness, isolation, and mental instability are recurring themes in Hunky Dory, explored in a more contemplative way here than in the more stylized, mythologized Ziggy Stardust. We've got the cracks in the sky, of course, and the lonely "girl with the mousy hair" of "Life on Mars?", the self-doubt of "Quicksand" ("I ain't got the power anymore"), the longing for community and leadership in "Song for Bob Dylan," and most of all, "The Bewlay Brothers." I can't tell you what the hell that song is about--Bowie's relationship with his brother, apparently--but behind the inscrutable lyrics is a deeply disturbing sense of alienation, loss, fear, and insanity. It's my favorite track on the album, eerie and sad.

The most obvious bridge from Hunky Dory to Ziggy Stardust is "Queen Bitch," a Velvet Underground tribute dripping with attitude and references to gay culture. The musical genre hopping is important too, as it shows Bowie's fascination with the form of rock 'n' roll itself: in addition to the Velvet Underground, we've got musical references to Sinatra in "Life on Mars?" (Bowie wrote it as a response to "My Way"), Neil Young in "Kooks" (can I say how odd it is to listen to "Kooks" after meeting Duncan Jones on Sunday?), and Dylan in "Song for Bob Dylan." The obsession with fame and stardom is also important: "living in a silent film," "the twisted name on Garbo's eyes" (in "Quicksand"), the idea of the "silver screen" with its "freakiest show" in contrast with dull reality in "Life on Mars?", and of course the entire ode to Andy Warhol that is "Andy Warhol," about blurring the boundaries between art and reality ("Andy Warhol, silver screen / can't tell them apart at all"). Clearly rock 'n' roll and fame were on Bowie's mind as he contemplated his future.

Then there's the repeated references to supermen and superior beings (not to mention the song called "The Supermen" on Bowie's previous album, The Man Who Sold the World, a reworked version of which appears as a bonus track on the Rykodisc release of Hunky Dory). I'm totally not making a value judgment here, but the influence of Nietzsche on Bowie's reinvention of himself is undeniable (I know I should use the primary source, but I'm lazy so the following quotes are from Derek Bradley's summary, which is the first thing that comes up when you Google "nietzsche superman" :P):

Since to Nietzsche everything in the world, including good and evil, is transitory (228) everything is being continually reinvented. The superman embraces this idea of change which to him appears evident, he understands the fact that since there is nothing in the world which is permanent whatever exists must eventually be overcome by something else which comes along. Seeing himself and his values in the same light he knows that these aspects must also be overcome by something stronger if not by him than by someone or something else. So in order to keep up with the times he continuously reinvents himself over and over always building something stronger, more powerful, on top of what went before. The superman therefore is the ideal of someone who has mastered the practice of overcoming himself.

(Let's see... "Changes"? Folky Bowie reinventing himself as the glam rock star of the new generation, replacing the "rock 'n' rollers" like Dylan? And continuing to recreate himself every couple of years throughout the 70s?)

Though suffering is at times necessary the superman redeems himself from it in his constant creating. This creating which allows him to overcome himself and through trial thus leads to improvement he calls his "will’s joy" (199). So if in order to overcome himself he must create and in creating he feels joy if he is constantly overcoming then with all the resulting joy he experiences, naturally, very little room is left for suffering.

(Creativity and self-creation giving meaning to life? Gee, where do we keep seeing that theme?)

In eliminating the idea of God and the values attached to it in his system he is forced to give us a parallel substitute, that is, another god like figure from whom we may receive our new values in order to fill the void which is created.

And thus we get the "leper messiah," Ziggy Stardust.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

I'm going to have to do a song by song analysis, because I don't want to forget any of the many things that I love about this album, and because it's at least partially a concept album that progresses in a narrative direction from beginning to end.

"Five Years" might be the best intro to an album that I've ever heard. It sets the stage perfectly for the world we're entering: the apocalypse looms and humanity has only five years to live. This setup could've been so gimmicky, but it works because the details feel so vivid and real. Bowie creates the song from little character vignettes: the narrator who knows the news is true because the newsman is crying, the mothers sighing in the market square, the girl who loses it and attacks children, the "queer" sickened by the cop who kisses the priest's feet (also notable that it's the people on the social margins, the "black" and the "queer," presented as more sympathetic than those at the top of the social hierarchy, the policeman and priest). And I love the oblivious smiling "you" in the ice cream parlor: "don't think you knew that you were in this song"--which on one level makes the listener complicit, suggests that we are living in this nightmare world too and we just don't know it--and on another level draws attention to the fact that what we're hearing is a song, the sort of postmodern reminder that appears throughout the album that this is fiction, theater. Ultimately this is a very archetypal, almost Biblical setup: the world is ending, people are desperate for hope--and so the stage is primed for a messiah.

"Five Years" is particularly powerful because its sense of sorrow for the loss of humanity is almost staggering ("I never thought I'd need so many people") and the tone of the song is so ominous and restrained. It seems to be building to a catharsis that never quite arrives, as Bowie's vocals become increasingly frantic but then finally disappear as the song fades back to just that eerie drum beat. The catharsis is coming, but you have to wait for the end of the record to hear it. The complimentary qualities of the opener and closer are one of the strongest aspects of Ziggy Stardust; "Five Years" and "Rock N Roll Suicide" both end with two of Bowie's most unhinged vocal performances.

There's also a hint of the album's undertones of spiritual longing in the lines "I kiss you, you're beautiful, I want you to walk"--a suggestion of the possibility of redemption and hope amidst all this darkness.

Ziggy Stardust isn't really a meticulously planned concept album; the songs don't all fit together as a literal story. This makes it stronger, as so much is subject to the interpretation of the listener. "Soul Love" is one of the songs that doesn't seem too literally connected to the rise and fall of Ziggy, but it works perfectly in setting the atmosphere of the young person searching for purpose and meaning. It's a meditation on the meaning of love, from someone who both longs for and feels disillusioned by it. There's a spiritual longing here in addition to a romantic one--we get the "new love" of the boy and girl creating "new words that only they can share in" but also the "soul love" of the priest telling of "god on high," and the narrator's longing "just to touch the flaming dove" (a symbol of Christian revelation?). But there's a bitter undercurrent here--the mother's love for her son who "gave his life to save the slogan"; love is "careless" and "descends on those defenseless"; the narrator concludes "All I have is my love of love - and love is not loving." Taken by itself this is a powerful description of the enigmatic nature of love; taken in the context of the album we can also see how this disillusioned spiritual longing opens the door for why Ziggy creates himself and for why his audience needs him.

The album really kicks into gear with "Moonage Daydream." Listen to those guitars! Unlike the comparatively contemplative songs that precede it, "Moonage Daydream" is a wild declaration. This feels like Bowie's announcement of himself as the new rock god; it's hard not to believe him, as soon as you hear "I'm an alligator, I'm a mama-papa coming for you / I'm the space invader, I'll be a rock 'n' rolling bitch for you." Here we're offered an answer to the spiritual longing of the previous song: "the church of man" is "such a holy place to be."

The lyrics are full of science fiction references and 70s American slang; today it still feels otherworldly, although in a different way now than it must've then. The entire album is full of slang which (I assume) sounded hip and futuristic in 1972 England, but of course its "freak out"s and "far out"s feel thoroughly retro to a modern listener. Still, there's no denying the wild energy of its exhortation to "Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah!" Mick Ronson's guitar is amazing; Bowie's words may be telling you about another world, but close your eyes and Ronson's soaring guitar takes you there.

"Starman" was intentionally written as the single and it's an adorably catchy bit of pop music. It's fun and seems quite innocent at first, but it's key to understanding the concept of the album. The children getting messages through their radios from an otherworldly messiah who tells them that life is worthwhile after all? It's Bowie's recurring theme (inspired by Nietzsche?) of the new generation replacing the previous--specifically here in the rise of the glam rockers, who complain that the "revolution stuff" of the Beatles and Stones is "such a drag" ("All the Young Dudes") and warn the rock 'n' rollers to look out ("Changes").

"Starman" taps right into the spiritual longing that we just heard articulated on "Soul Love"; it's the stuff of archetypal mythology, the magic being in the sky come to tell us that everything's going to be okay. The ambiguity here is brilliant. Is there really a superior being communicating through the radio? Or are the kids mistaking a rock star for a messiah? Is Ziggy inspired by the alien, or is Ziggy the alien who becomes a rock star, or is Ziggy the rock star who gets mistaken for an alien? And talk about life imitating art; Bowie's performance of this song on Top of the Pops (one of the big breaks on his road to superstardom) couldn't have been more perfect. Plenty of the kids watching did take him for a messiah, and quite a few seem to have taken him for an alien as well!

Bowie intentionally chose the term "starman" and not, I don't know, "spaceman" or something--another blurring of the boundary between alien messiah and rock star. (I haven't actually counted the number of times the word "star" appears on this album, but it's a lot!) The song could be science fiction, the alien in the sky with a message of hope for humanity, but it's also a perfect description of the first time a child is deeply moved by music. It's about the wonder and awe of hearing something extraordinary, something that opens your mind and changes your perspective on the world, something so amazing that it seems like it must come from another planet--something that feels specially yours, that you hide from your parents and share only with other kids who understand.

Why did Bowie decide to cover "It Ain't Easy"? I'm not sure--for me it's the least interesting song on the album (though that's not much of a criticism given that it's surrounded by classics). It's fine, but any of the Bowie-written outtakes (used as B-sides or released as bonus tracks) would've probably been better (I can't believe "Velvet Goldmine" was just a B-side!) That said, I can think of a few reasons "It Ain't Easy" works in the context of Ziggy Stardust--it sounds like a rock 'n' roll spiritual, and its lyrics fit right in--the young man trying to figure out his place in the world, the spiritual struggle ("It ain't easy to get to heaven when you're going down"), the people turning to the "good Lord" to help them "pull on through."

"Lady Stardust" is another view of rock star as mythological icon, this time from a wistful, longing perspective. There's a hint that what we're hearing about is something both gone (or at least unreachable) and yet immortal; it's told in the past tense, and the emphasis on "He was all right / the band was all together" suggests that this is no longer true, and yet "the song went on forever." There's a good reason that Bowie was a gay icon at the time (and not just because he decided to promote the album by "coming out")--it's hard to interpret the longing for forbidden love here as anything else, as the narrator "smiled sadly for a love I could not obey" while "Lady Stardust sang his songs of darkness and dismay." It's also a view of the rock star from outside, of his effect on the audience: the femme fatales emerging from the shadows, the boys standing on their chairs, and the narrator sighing with longing.

"Star" (yes, that word does come up a lot!) is back to the (wanna-be) rock star as narrator (the sometimes-ambiguous switches in POV add so much depth to the album), and it's hard to see this as anything but autobiographical, given the "wild mutation" Bowie himself was about to make. It's the story of a young man trying to figure out what to do with his life and how to make an impact on the world--he considers what his peers (the children "try[ing] to change their worlds" from "Changes"?) have done and concludes "I could make it all worthwhile as a rock 'n' roll star." His motivations are mixed: the desire to change the world, but also the surprisingly honest admission that "I could do with the money." The song concludes with a confession: "I could fall asleep at night as a rock 'n' roll star / I could fall in love all right as a rock 'n' roll star." This is rock stardom as the search for emotional fulfillment. Of course, as pretty much anyone who has spent any amount of time observing pop culture knows, becoming famous is far more likely to exacerbate personal problems than to solve them. (Exhibit A: Bowie's own first few years of fame.)

What enables him to contemplate the possibility to choose to become a rock star is that he knows it's a performance--it would be "so enticing to play the part." My favorite moment in the song is best heard with headphones or the volume cranked loud--as the music fades out Bowie confidently announces "Just watch me now." And, wow, was there about to be plenty to watch! Here we get the merging of fantasy and reality that Bowie mused over in "Andy Warhol"--Bowie saw that by playing the part of the rock 'n' roll star, he could become one.

The rock star as messiah leading his followers is even more clear on "Hang On To Yourself" -- the groupie (?) "praying to the light machine," Ziggy's announcement that "You're the blessed, we're the Spiders From Mars." There's an obvious sexual subtext to this song (and to much of the album), even the suggestion of sex as a form of worship. The song is a fast-paced rush, capturing the sense of the band on its rise to stardom: "Come on, come on, we've really got a good thing going." But there's an ominous subtext here: "If you think we're gonna make it / you better hang on to yourself" is also a warning. As the band speeds to the top, there's a risk of losing themselves; the rise will be inevitably followed by the fall.

"Ziggy Stardust" is my favorite song on the record, probably my favorite Bowie song (though "Station to Station" gives it a run for its money), and one of my all-time favorite songs, period. It tells the story of Ziggy's rise and fall from the view of his band.

The other day I was reading up on the allusions and references Dorothy Dunnett uses throughout the Lymond Chronicles. There are some great documents at Game of Kings that contain the full text of old songs and poems from various religions/myths (Greek, Roman, Russian, Irish, Jewish, Christian...), stories of heroes and saviors and quests and betrayals. And then "Ziggy Stardust" came on and I realized, oh, this is the exact same thing! It's a modern myth for an era in which rock 'n' roll has become religion. No wonder this album became a classic; this is the stuff of archetypal mythology, the messiah betrayed and destroyed by his followers.

It's very Christian, obviously, but it's also older than that. The following is from an essay by Birgit Sahm which can be found at the Dunnett discussion group Marzipan. It's actually about the Dionysian/Apollinian dichotomy in Lymond, but what's fascinating is how precisely her description of the Greek god Dionysos applies to Ziggy Stardust:

Dionysos is the god of wine and of madness, of intoxication and creative ecstasy. But he is an atypical Greek deity. While the Olympian gods are bright beings of sunlight, Dionysos is a creature of mystery, his very essence an enigma. His realm is shadowy, and his followers flirt with madness, drunkenness and death. He is the patron deity of the Maenads (or Bacchantes), the wild women, roaming the mountains, tearing apart living animals in their trance of divine possession.

His preference for appearing masked emphasizes the fact that he is a stranger, believed to have come from the wild Thrakian north. He is a god who come into and changes, often irrevocably, the normal community life.

He is a god of the liquid element, the god of wine. But water is also a part of Dionysos' domain. The sea is a refuge for Dionysos. Water is the element in which Dionysos feels so at home, as like him, it betrays a dual nature: being bright, joyous, and vital for life, while also having a side that is dark, mysterious and deadly.

Dionysos has introduced the grapevine, is the wine-god, and thus should be a pleasant fellow, a benefactor. But wine has both positive and negative aspects. It makes people drunk, causes them to behave in strange ways. The Greeks were well aware of the dual nature of wine, mirrored by the dual nature of its god.

He roams through the wilderness, followed by bands of ecstatic women, the Maenads, and Satyrs (or Silens). Dionysos often seems to stand somewhere between male and female, between god and man, between death and life. He is a male god, but he is mostly surrounded by women, his chief worshippers. His worship involved transvestism and the blurring of sex roles. Men and women both dressed in long robes covered by fawnskins, and women, as maenads, left their normal sphere of activity, the home, and danced madly on mountainsides. Dionysos even looks somewhat ambiguous sexually: Pentheus in the Bacchae comments on the god's effeminacy: his long curls, his pale complexion.

One unique characteristic of Dionysos is that he is the god who dies and is reborn: he is killed and torn to pieces by the Titans and later resurrected by Zeus.

He is the god of theatre. The duality of Dionysos is related to another one of his attributes, which is that of loss of identity. The actors in the plays performed for Dionysos were masked; the masks symbolizing the submersion of their identity into that of another. Wine also has the effect of submerging the normal personality of the person who drinks it. Dionysos made a habit of stealing the identities of his worshippers; the maenads dancing on the mountainsides have no seperate personalities; they are mad, crazed, they have been taken over by the god; and they are all alike. In this respect they are behaving in the same way crowds often do, in which the individual is sublimated by the mob. Dionysos induces mass hysteria, he is the god of mob fury. This loss of individuality is demonstrated in the theatre not only by the masks which the actors wear but also by the chorus. They dance and sing in unison, all chanting the same words. The members of the chorus have no identity, each is merely an insignificant part of the whole, with no separate will. All individuality and willpower must be given up to Dionysos, when the god choses to take it.

It's so self-evident that I don't think I even need to explain how this relates to Ziggy and to Bowie. (I'm going to have a lot of fun re-reading Queen's Play with that in mind.) That last bit about the mob singing in unison is a description of a rock concert (look at the hysteria of the screaming mostly-female crowd in Ziggy Stardust: the Motion Picture, and Bowie's description of Dylan looking through his followers' eyes and telling them how to see). There's also the "masks" and shifting identities of makeup, costumes, and characters that Bowie (the stage name itself is another "mask" for David Jones) wears; the god torn to pieces ("when the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band"); Ziggy's bisexuality, drag, and gender ambiguity; the theatricality of the Ziggy performances (Bowie even did a mime routine as part of the show); the recurring theme of madness in Bowie's work and the real drug addiction in his life; the quest for artistic inspiration and creative success; and Ziggy's role as leader encouraging the children to rise up and change the world is certainly a disruption of "normal community life." The description "bright, joyous, and vital for life, while also having a side that is dark, mysterious and deadly" could've been written about this album.

Ziggy is an amalgamation of rock icons, not just an exaggeration of David Bowie; the fact that he's a left-handed guitar player must surely come from Jimi Hendrix, and the "long black hair" and "animal grace" of "Lady Stardust" sound like Marc Bolan (apparently at times they projected Bolan's image while playing the song). But there are certainly bits of Bowie in Ziggy (the "screwed-up eyes") and what Bowie was about to become ("like some cat from Japan"). Ziggy is an archetype, more than a single individual.

The structure of this song is wonderful. "Ziggy played guitar" begins as an introduction and ends as an epitaph, and it's the only repeated element. (Interestingly, the Rykodisc CD contains as a bonus track a "Ziggy Stardust" demo in which the last few lines are repeated, but the song is far stronger without the repetition.) There's no traditional verse-chorus-verse; we're hearing a rock version of a mythological narrative. First we're told of Ziggy's legendary qualities, his charisma and ability to awe his audience, but the song turns dark as his band begins to resent his fame. This song must be heard on headphones; listen to the sound reflect the words, as one clear Bowie voice introduces Ziggy's legend, then splits into two as the band gets angry.

Is our narrator reliable? Did Ziggy really take "it all too far"? Is his band just jealous? Is it a mix of both? (Did Bowie intentionally turn this song into reality when he broke up the band and fired the Spiders? Did he get so submerged in the fantasy that he couldn't tell himself from Ziggy? Or was the story just such an accurate description of the pattern of rock stardom that Bowie couldn't help but live it?)

And don't even get me started on the genius of the guitar riff.... And the phrase "Leper Messiah" could not be better chosen. I don't even know what else to say about this song. It makes me want to learn more about music so that I'll have more words to articulate why this is so perfect.

The placement of "Suffragette City" as the penultimate track is a bit odd. It works better here musically than lyrically, as a cathartic interlude between the darker/slower songs telling of Ziggy's ending. Lyrically I have no freaking clue what it's about (sex, obviously, and youth culture is invoked via slang and a Clockwork Orange reference, but uh, who's Henry and why's he on the phone?), but musically it rocks out and drips with attitude. With that "Wham bam thank you ma'am!" how could it not become a classic?

And, finally, "Rock N Roll Suicide." Is David Bowie trying to kill me? How can it be possible that this many amazing songs exist on a single album?

This one sort of reminds me of "'Heroes'" because of its shift in tone and its mix of irony and sincerity. (If you've only heard the shortened version of "'Heroes'" you must listen to the full version immediately.) It begins with a description of Ziggy as the washed-up, fallen star who's "lived too long," then it turns into this sort of over-the-top show tune thing, like the faded star as a cheesy Vegas entertainer. But this song transcends its cliches; "Oh no love, you're not alone" is sung with such desperate passion that it's impossible not to be moved. Why is Ziggy described in the second person, and who is this voice who's "had my share" and "will help you with the pain"? Is this another aspect of Ziggy's psyche? A promise of redemption and hope? Or just the culmination of the Vegas cliche, telling the crowd to "Give me your hands 'cause you're wonderful." I really think it is ambiguous; is there a hope of rebirth here or just a pathetic finality as we fade out on one last, desperate "Give me your hands"?

And isn't this the ultimate resonance of rock music, and maybe of religion too--the promise that we're not alone, that we're special, that someone understands us and will be there to help us?

There are a lot of prisms through which one could examine Ziggy Stardust (I'm thinking that studying Ziggy in relation to the social, cultural, and economic upheaval of the late '60s/early 70s would be fascinating) but its exploration of the spiritual power of rock 'n' roll is the most personally compelling aspect to me. I'm not exactly saying it's a good thing; blind worship is one of the things that scares me most about religion, and it was only a few years after this that Bowie (hopefully in a fit of cocaine-induced insanity) called Hitler the first rock star. But much like those people who've been deeply moved by religion but also have ambiguous feelings about it, I find myself continually fascinated by the power rock music has over me. The most alive I've ever felt has been at rock concerts--the only reason I understand what the word "spiritual" means is because of what I've experienced through music. All the really batshit crazy things I've done in my life have been inspired by it--I've invested body, mind, and soul, and taken insane risks. I love that The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars captures both sides of music as a search for meaning and connection--the passion, inspiration, awe, the joy of feeling truly alive, but also possessiveness, jealousy, mania, insanity, abuse of power, self-destruction. And I love that its conclusion is ambiguous, that you can't have the good without the bad, but that maybe something so powerful is worth pursuing no matter what.

 

"Till there was rock, you only had God" comes from the Ziggy outtake "Sweet Head."

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