•
Rating: Little Introduction
It might be because I've always had a fondness for student songs and masquerades that I started to love this genre from a very young age: glam-rock (from glamourous, seductive) as a youthful musical movement was represented by a series of carnival-like singers and bands that dominated the charts from the early '70s until punk.
After the dreams of flower-power and the whole hippie utopia ended with Vietnam, Altamont, and drug-related deaths, the time of heroes without a flag arrived; something else was needed for the language of youthful music to perpetuate itself.
The '70s canons required a different approach from the '60s on all fronts: those who went to a rock concert expected much more than the audience of the previous decade: from flashy clothes—because otherwise, you couldn't see the band from afar—to increasingly powerful lights and amplification, etc., etc. The audience had changed, too. The teenager of the '60s had grown up with rock and roll and beat, born from an unconscious rebellion of adolescents, and until 1967/68 when the conscious rejection of traditional values and the birth of alternative values became more marked—drug subculture as an expansion of consciousness, political rebellion, pacifism, mysticism, etc., etc.—
The teenager of the '70s, richer than the previous decade, is bombarded by the myths of withdrawal, sexual freedom, mass media, technology, and consumerism that enclose him in a golden limbo of eternal Peter Pan far from politics and ideologies: a glimmer of adolescent malaise and rebellion will be found in the masked ball of glam rock, that is, the old rock revamped by contaminating previous musical experiences with hard-rock, electronics, choreography, and theatrical scenography. Since in this genre the aesthetics often dominated more than the music, I believe the problem of the mask must also be considered.
To what realm does the mask refer? To the vegetative forces of nature? To the world of animals, their vital energies, their symbolic meaning? Or to the world of the dead: is it a personification of the dead? The mask, in fact, assimilates its wearer to the subject it portrays, whatever it may be. Subnatural or supernatural, wearing a mask is an ancient human need, a rite of passage periods. In prehistoric times, disguising as animals allowed primordial hunters to camouflage themselves and surprise prey, but also to assume ritually, with appearance, powers and qualities attributed to certain animals. The mask allowed adopting the identity of other human beings and even superhuman or mythical beings, with all the narrative, mystical, and mystificatory possibilities linked to that mask and of which Carnival celebrates the memory. In the pagan world, the habit of mass dressing-up appeared in the Saturnalia and Bacchanalia, which later became less licentious in the Christian Carnival. The use of paroxysmal sounds was common in carnival parties, featuring masks of wild men, thus taking on strong symbolic values, almost as if to evoke a primordial chaos, that pandemic chaos of the oldest pagan rites. Even Leonardo da Vinci gives us a Renaissance testimony with the masks of the "omini salvatichi", masks and costumes designed for Galeazzo di Sanseverino's party held in Milan in 1491.
The mask of popular music can only be that of Dionysus, who mythologically is one with Hades-Pluto, as Heraclitus stated, and is therefore a premonition of death, where the singer-prophet is no longer the messenger-bard of a generation of young people, but a mass joker without a court, a kind of "generational prophet," and more often than not a rock singer-songwriter or a degenerate electronic trickster, estranged and trendy, intellectual and buffoon, singing often deceptive messages.
In that youth imaginary that today seems far away, Dylan, Hendrix, Morrison, and Lennon were assimilated into crucified prophets, (Dionysus-Christ dismembered, therefore); to a lesser extent, one can mention Mick Jagger, and still to be quantified is the meteor Syd Barrett, whose creeping cult has become a sort of elitist religion, skillfully fueled by the same Pink Floyd.
In rock, and sometimes even in progressive rock, the theatrical aspect was thus exaggerated, the staging en travesti, replacing student rebellion with an aesthetic revolt, and commitment with narcissism and the cult of the ego, the rock-star, which ended up producing punk anarchy on one side and the disco withdrawal on the other, before house music, dance, and super-pop slowly took away every ecological niche from rock, relegating it today to a folklore phenomenon.
David Bowie: Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust (1972)
After the space-folk—mix between Donovan-Dylan-Barrett—of Space Oddity (1st l.p), Bowie's titanic cycle of ascent to success began with The Man Who Sold the World (1971)—a sulfurous metal/electronic album, perhaps one of his best works ever... If you get the chance, give it a listen, it feels like hearing a hallucinated Dylan singing over slightly refined Black Sabbath music. Bowie had to buy thousands of unsold copies himself to avoid collapse. Our compositional schizophrenia starts here, passes through the pop art-lounge-hippie of Hunky Dory (1972), and reaches its peak with the sci-fi/hollywood comic of Ziggy Stardust and his Spiders from Mars, inspired by the more or less true story of a '50s rock star. The arrangements are by Bowie's George Martin, Ken Scott, the violent and mellifluous guitars of Mick Ronson, Bowie's voice at its peak of narcissism, almost adolescent and annoying, a mixed vocal dish of Neil Sedaka’s adenoids (yes! listen and feel, after all, our guy liked Tony Newley) and Dylan and Lennon's noses: Five Years opens the sci-fi rock opera, with a waltz time grafted onto a classic slow '50s... it comes out as a funeral dirge: there are 5 years until the end of the world and Ziggy is arriving on Earth as a leprous messiah for the adoring crowds. The protagonist observes the people in supermarkets, the cops, the boys, and his girl who sucks milkshakes all alone- (Ah, if an Italian band of the '70s had these poetic licenses, imagine the criticism of populism...). To accentuate the alien effect, Bowie has his doubled uvula with spatial reverb an octave lower, an effect he will reuse on several songs until Ashes to ashes and I believe the forerunner was still Barrett with the P.Floyd on The Gnome.
The roaring guitars and sliding strings close the exciting and well-acted crooning of Five Years, followed by the delightful Soul Love, a samba-ballad with Beatles-like lullabies. Then there’s Moonage Daydream that expands Bolan's glam-space ballads with Mick Ronson, who gets all the credit for the dreamy final solo with a super-saturated guitar note—a precursor to Heroes—seasoned with glissando of psycho-violins in the style of the Beatles’ Fool on the Hill. Next, stand out the Lennon-like Starman—that Star----meeeen sounds so Beatles but so Beatles that I’m tempted to believe in a theft from the initial verse of Got to get into my life... Well anyway, chapeau for the invention) ; then follows a cover of the gospel blues It Ain't Easy which leaves me a bit puzzled as a choice, like what does it have to do with it? Side B of the vinyl, which sounds better than the CD: I had a Ziggy vinyl that sounded great...: Tempo delle mele overture with Lady Stardust, dedicated to Bolan, then the dizzying rock'n roll of Hang On to Yourself -great performance, almost pre-punk -, the self-aggrandizing Star - the title track Ziggy Stardust -was remade very wickedly by Bauhaus- the street-rock of Suffragette City, and the self-destructive-titanic finale of Rock'n Roll Suicide. Compared to other concept-albums of the period, Ziggy Stardust is so theatrical that in the end, you don’t know if Bowie believes it or pretends it- yet it’s so exciting "to play the part." Theatre, mime, platform shoes, Hollywood costumes, up to La Roche's makeup for the cover of Aladin Sane: the tours consecrate Bowie as the most futuristic and multimedia rock star, always ahead of his time. And through rock, the doors of cinema, the musical Diamond Dogs, disco-music with Moroder, the first new-wave with Eno, music videos...Mick Ronson will pursue a solo career and make two covers of Italian songs, Battisti, Io vorrei non vorrei ma se vuoi and Io me ne andrei by Baglioni. A sour note about our Starman "used" to spaceships: during tours, he traveled only by train or ship because he was afraid of planes! (sic)
Another negative thing, unfortunately, must be noted, and this is the right place: the Bowie of the '80s ended up burying the great things of the '70s, wanting to chase every trend and at all costs from Scary Monsters onwards to be a pop-star, and not finding peace—even at the cost of glaring style slips, until recycling himself in the most base techno, in rap—with Mickey Rourke (!) on the horrid Never Let Me Down-, until abandoning halfway through a concert in Italy in the '90s for a small audience...English Style or Zero Style, Boh! : and then, I say, how can one at sixty accept going to the sleazy show of Celentano and setting up a senseless dialogue of the deaf with a final altercation...Ziggy has passed away, waiting in the sky, and down here remains his mythical costume, the one from the cover... You can see it at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and Museum in Cleveland...or at my house -admitted only women given the character- it’s an identical copy of Ziggy's famous silver python pattern: I got it at a sale of show clothes that I used to play at a carnival party ...and they mistook me for one of Duran Duran. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Loading comments slowly
