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Rating: Sure, Bowie has always been a great son of a bitch.
What many adoring fans, who sprouted like mushrooms in England in the wake of the epic "Ziggy Stardust...", acclaimed thanks to this album, actually represented a stab to the heart, a swan song of an artist who was perhaps experiencing the most intense moment, emotionally and professionally, of his career: the prelude to an unexpected choice realized at London's Hammersmith Odeon, amidst disbelief and tears.
When "Aladdin Sane" was released, the myth of Glam Rock had reached its never-to-be-equaled peak: it was 1973, and everywhere acrobats, imitators, prophets of eyeliner, and flamboyant jackets, the pathetic and extravagant poor men's Elvises, all the young dandies were popping up.
Marc Bolan collected hit after hit but gnawed at the success of the man who fell to earth: but Bowie was thinking of other things, and not just heroin.
So this is not the album that consecrates glam, it is the album that kills it. Definitively.
Also because, at least sonically, it is probably and paradoxically the only "glam" album of the androgynous Martian, the one that best summarizes the spirit of his early '70s trajectory: reaching the masses but carrying on a deeply personal—if not cryptic—discourse, hiding his own tormented identity crisis, his own hysteria, his own "aristocratic" and capricious alienation beneath pop choruses and the melodramatic scratches of melancholic ballads.
"Aladdin Sane" (a lad insane) is Bowie looking at himself in the mirror with a glass of Möet & Chandon in hand, laughing at himself, at the people around him, at time passing relentlessly and that cannot be corrupted, it cannot be prostituted. It is an exaggeration of his own ego and how it observes and judges life. Songs written to chart but whose function is to put the final point to a "genre" that was born to die in a short time, drowned by rhetoric, vacuity, by its innate irresponsibility.
It is the American tour, the consecration of glory so much desired and finally obtained, that pushes him toward a redefinition of his being an artist, almost taking the position of a philosopher, reflecting on the meaning of a life immersed in unbridled stardom among drugs, groupies, media exposure, cult of his own ego (the cover of the album would deserve a paragraph of its own), famous friendships, and a fame that begins to ruthlessly show both sides of the coin.
The sound is fat, pompous, defiant as in "Cracked Actor" ("I'm stiff on my legend", he sings), raw and rough bubblegum. Bowie takes the epic of the Rolling Stones as a reference, paying homage to them with a cover ("Let's Spend The Night Together", anticipating "Pin Ups") and with that "Watch That Man" (a cynical portrait of the New York "beautiful life") that sums up the sarcastic and direct face of the album.
The second face is more explicitly existentialist, as in the beautiful title track (inspired by Evelyn Waugh's "Vile Bodies"), an absolutely atypical piece for Bowie's standards of those years, in which the anarchic and eccentric keyboards of Mike Garson dominate (and I won't add anything else), or in the bitter and dramatic "Time", one of the most bizarre and haunting songs ever made by Bowie (with a "historic" solo by Mick Ronson), a sort of grim and fatalistic vaudeville provoked by Billy Murcia's overdose death, the drummer of the New York Dolls.
Bowie's voice is as always chameleonic, now tense, now bawdy, now almost sobbing: conceptually, America enters forcefully into his imagination, and he projects it into a hypothetical future devastated by nuclear energy ("Drive In Saturday, musically almost a less neurotic revisitation of 'Rock'n'Roll Suicide', and the acidic 'Panic In Detroit'), instead presenting a more intimate turn in "The Prettiest Star", with a string section that seems a parody of the soundtracks of some dreamy "plastic" Hollywood movie of the '50s.
It is then time for "The Jean Genie", a single that today we would call a "lead" of the album but still in some sense tied to "Ziggy Stardust": a very famous song, it is a pompous and engaging blues that crawls over Bowie's verses, once again resorting to wordplay, references, allusions to drugs, and his disorienting experience in the USA. There's no need for a Francis to define it as one of the most representative pieces of the White Duke's career: not the best, but certainly one of the most emblematic, despite it seems to have been written with Iggy Pop in mind.
The closure is entrusted to the sweet and sad "Lady Grinning Soul", also profoundly in line with the decadent and disenchanted mood of the album.
Theoretically, there would be no trace of the turning point that will lead Bowie to abandon his astronettes and his spiders from Mars, transforming into something else not yet well defined: perhaps only he knew that what could seem like a momentary meditation on the historical period in which he had been a protagonist was actually a chapter about to be closed without second thoughts, unbeknownst to everyone.
Yet all this had already been announced in "Aladdin Sane" itself: "Who will love Aladdin Sane? / Millions weep like fountains / In case the dawn arrives / Who will love Aladdin Sane?".
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
02 Aladdin Sane (05:07)
Watching him dash away
Swinging an old bouquet
Dead roses
Sake and strange divine
Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh
You'll make it
Passionate bright young things
Takes him away to war
Don't fake it
Sadden glissando strings
Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh
You'll make it
Who will love Aladdin Sane
Battle cries and champagne just in time for sunrise
Who will love Aladdin Sane
Motor sensational
Paris or maybe hell
I'm waiting
Clutches of sad remains
Waits for Aladdin Sane
You'll make it
Who will love Aladdin Sane
Millions weep a fountain, just in case of sunrise
Who will love Aladdin Sane
We'll love Aladdin Sane
Love Aladdin Sane
Who will love Aladdin Sane
Millions weep a fountain, just in case of sunrise
Who will love Aladdin Sane
We'll love Aladdin Sane
We'll love Aladdin Sane
04 Panic in Detroit (04:25)
He looked a lot like Che Guevara, drove a diesel van
Kept his gun in quiet seclusion, such a humble man
The only survivor of the National People's Gang
Panic in Detroit, I asked for an autograph
He wanted to stay home, I wish someone would phone
Panic in Detroit
He laughed at accidental sirens that broke the evening gloom
The police had warned of repercussions
They followed none too soon
A trickle of strangers were all that were left alive
Panic in Detroit, I asked for an autograph
He wanted to stay home, I wish someone would phone
Panic in Detroit
Putting on some clothes I made my way to school
And I found my teacher crouching in his overalls
I screamed and ran to smash my favourite slot machine
And jumped the silent cars that slept at traffic lights
Having scored a trillion dollars, made a run back home
Found him slumped across the table. A gun and me alone
I ran to the window. Looked for a plane or two
Panic in Detroit. He'd left me an autograph
"Let me collect dust." I wish someone would phone
Panic in Detroit
05 Cracked Actor (03:01)
I've come on a few years from my Hollywood Highs
The best of the last, the cleanest star they ever had
I'm stiff on my legend, the films that I made
Forget that I'm fifty cause you just got paid
Crack, baby, crack, show me you're real
Smack, baby, smack, is that all that you feel
Suck, baby, suck, give me your head
Before you start professing that you're knocking me dead
You caught yourself a trick down on Sunset and Vine
But since he pinned you baby you're a porcupine
You sold me illusions for a sack full of cheques
You've made a bad connection 'cause I just want your sex
Crack, baby, crack, show me you're real
Smack, baby, smack, is that all that you feel
Suck, baby, suck, give me your head
Before you start professing that you're knocking me dead
06 Time (05:15)
Time - He's waiting in the wings
He speaks of senseless things
His script is you and me boys
Time - He flexes like a whore
Falls wanking to the floor
His trick is you and me, boy
Time - In Quaaludes and red wine
Demanding Billy Dolls
And other friends of mine
Take your time
The sniper in the brain, regurgitating drain
Incestuous and vain, and many other last names
I look at my watch it say 9:25 and I think Oh God I'm still alive
We should be on by now
We should be on by now
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la (repeat)
You - are not a victim
You - just scream with boredom
You - are not evicting time
Chimes - Goddamn, you're looking old
You'll freeze and catch a cold
'Cause you've left your coat behind
Take your time
Breaking up is hard, but keeping dark is hateful
I had so many dreams, I had so many breakthroughs
But you, my love, were kind, but love has left you dreamless
The door to dreams was closed. Your park was real dreamless
Perhaps you're smiling now, smiling through this darkness
But all I had to give was the guilt for dreaming
We should be on by now (x5)
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la (repeat)
Yeah, time!
09 The Jean Genie (04:07)
A small Jean Genie snuck off to the city
Strung out on lasers and slash back blazers
Ate all your razors while pulling the waiters
Talking bout Monroe and walking on Snow White
New York's a go-go and everything tastes nice
Poor little Greenie
CHORUS
Jean Genie lives on his back
The Jean Genie loves chimney stacks
He's outrageous, he screams and he bawls
Jean Genie, let yourself go!
Sits like a man but he smiles like a reptile
She loves him, she loves him but just for a short while
She'll scratch in the sand, won't let go his hand
He says he's a beautician and sells you nutrition
And keeps all your dead hair for making up underwear
Poor little Greenie
CHORUS
He's so simple minded he can't drive his module
He bites on the neon and sleeps in the capsule
Loves to be loved, loves to be loved
CHORUS (repeat)
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Other reviews
By BrunoDP
Here, the fingers dance on the keys until they break every rhythmic coherence, only to recover at the end the cadenced pace of the splendid refrain.
Bowie stages on stage the death of his character Ziggy Stardust and with it a musical genre that will not awaken except in pathetic ’90s glam regurgitations.
By Dune Buggy
"From the first track, 'Watch That Man,' the clean alien aesthetics have given way to a dirty, scratched, rough, distorted sound."
"The album is a milestone in the 'pop-rock' panorama and remains fundamental and still very relevant for anyone who wants to know not only Bowie but the path taken by music from the 70s onwards."
