Borrowing heavily from
Marc Bolan
's glam rock and the future shock of A Clockwork Orange,
David Bowie
reached back to the heavy rock of
The Man Who Sold the World
for
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
. Constructed as a loose concept album about an androgynous alien rock star named Ziggy Stardust, the story falls apart quickly, yet
Bowie
's fractured, paranoid lyrics are evocative of a decadent, decaying future, and the music echoes an apocalyptic, nuclear dread. Fleshing out the off-kilter metallic mix with fatter guitars, genuine pop songs, string sections, keyboards, and a cinematic flourish,
Ziggy Stardust
is a glitzy array of riffs, hooks, melodrama, and style and the logical culmination of glam.
Mick Ronson
plays with a maverick flair that invigorates rockers like "Suffragette City," "Moonage Daydream," and "Hang Onto Yourself," while "Lady Stardust," "Five Years," and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" have a grand sense of staged drama previously unheard of in rock & roll. And that self-conscious sense of theater is part of the reason why
sounds so foreign.
succeeds not in spite of his pretensions but because of them, and
-- familiar in structure, but alien in performance -- is the first time his vision and execution met in such a grand, sweeping fashion. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine