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So, at the beginning of 1972, he got a short, spiky haircut, donned a spacey cat suit and platform boots, let slip to an interviewer that he was bisexual, recorded the sublime single "Starman" and became Ziggy Stardust, the beloved and doomed ultimate rock star. Real life and fiction merged on "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars," released barely six months after "Hunky Dory." The album's vague plot goes approximately thus: In a doomed world -- "News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in" -- young Ziggy listens to the radio and hears a "starman" delivering the cosmic gospel, "Let all the children boogie." He takes heed and decides, "I could make a transformation as a rock 'n' roll star." (After all, he muses, "I could do with the money/I'm so wiped out with things as they are.") Though we're told elliptically of Ziggy's success, flameout ("Ziggy sucked up into his mind") and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide," Bowie jumbles up the points of view and star metaphors until we can't tell the difference between alien and human, performer and fan, future and present, Ziggy and Bowie. It's not only a winning batch of songs with echoes of Bolan, the Beatles and Reed, but also a smart pop-art statement about itself and one of the few "concept albums" truly worthy of the term. At the start of the Ziggy experiment, Bowie began traveling around in limos with an ever-present bodyguard, assuming the prerogatives of stardom before he'd earned them. In the middle of the hype, he found time to co-produce Reed's "Transformer" album and remix the Stooges' "Raw Power," side projects that cemented his affiliation with the addled royalty of outsider rock. (His resuscitation of Iggy Pop as a solo act a few years later helped, too.) And he donated one of his best songs, the anthemic smash "All the Young Dudes," to Mott the Hoople, producing their album as well, which ensured his primacy over the glam field. In the year following the release of "Ziggy Stardust," Bowie's look got weirder and weirder: The casual blond spikes became a lurid scarlet nimbus, the layers of pancake multiplied until he looked like a zombie, fake hands grew out of his cat suit to clutch at his nipples. "The idea was to hit a look somewhere between the Malcolm McDowell thing with the one mascaraed eyelash and insects," he told an interviewer in 1993. At the same time, he was writing darker songs like "Panic in Detroit," "Cracked Actor" and "The Jean Genie," which appeared on the muddy, manic 1973 follow-up, "Aladdin Sane": Ziggy was becoming the picture of Bowie's Dorian Gray. In July 1973, Bowie abruptly retired Ziggy without explanation. He came out with an amusing but unnecessary album of '60s covers, "Pin-Ups," then planned to write a stage musical based on "1984," but George Orwell's widow withheld the rights. He went ahead anyway with the roughly Orwellian suite that is "Diamond Dogs." The charging title song and "Rebel Rebel" are among Bowie's best singles and close off the glam era with decadent aplomb, but elsewhere on the album he delved into the depersonalizing effects of Orwell's totalitarian society in "We Are the Dead" and "Rock 'n' Roll With Me," whose chorus goes "When you rock 'n' roll with me/There's no one else I'd rather be." The absence of "with" at the end of that line points toward the icy, unhinged narcissism of Bowie's next phase. Having relocated to the States and bid farewell to the ambisexual orgies of Ziggy's heyday, in 1974 Bowie bought a wardrobe full of double-breasted jackets and fat ties and set about becoming the most ersatz soul crooner ever. "Young Americans" is pretty fine as an update of the honored English tradition of appropriating black American music (and Robert Palmer clearly took notes), but it's no more interesting than any other record featuring Luther Vandross on vocals and David Sanborn on sax -- with the exception of the glorious, incomprehensible title song and "Fame," his first American No. 1 single. Bowie next remodeled himself into the Thin White Duke, a persona so chilling that he seemed to be faking being human, like the extraterrestrial character he played in his first feature film, Nicholas Roeg's 1976 "The Man Who Fell to Earth." Bowie was excellent in the role, but it remains unclear just how much he was acting. The same year, he released one of his finest records, "Station to Station," which portrays a nearly psychotic emotional disconnection: "It's not the side effects of the cocaine/I'm thinking that it must be love"; "Should I believe that I've been stricken?/Does my face show some kind of glow?" Equivocation marks the gorgeous, unsettling love song "Stay," and the breathless narrator of "TVC15" communes only with his TV, telling us an unclear story about how it's sucked up his girlfriend. The music, slithery funk with overlays of squealing rock guitar and florid piano, is as audacious and peculiar as any rock music before or since. I used to play the hit single, "Golden Years," over and over, though I doubt many child psychologists would endorse this much coked-up anomie in an 11-year-old's diet.
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