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Rating: I apologize in advance, as this will be a rather spontaneous review...
It's difficult for me to talk about Bowie...
This is a shitty album, kitschy, emphatic, fake, melodramatic...a kind of parody...yet, despite this, or perhaps because of this, it's a fantastic album.
The worst—therefore the best—was only achieved by punk, making music that seemed like it couldn't be any shittier, even shittier. After all, everyone knows that some song by the Pistols borrowed the riff from some song on this album. And for me, that's where the circle closes.
Except then the difference with punk is that Bowie staged it, and punk was the scene.
But no kitsch, no melodrama in punk; what was needed was the admirable essentiality and the dry, nervous sound of the best songs by Ziggy. The rest, too cool stuff, will be one of the textbooks for a certain new wave.
Oh yes, Bowie was cool, very cool, and the punks were not. Punks were horrible. And many, many of them, as kids, were taken by the hand by Uncle David, dazzled by his perfect transcendent image.
That Bowie was a mystical androgynous harlequin freak with bicolored eyes that came from where, from Mars? Please, watch the video of when he sang "Starman" on Top of the Pops.
I too would have liked to be taken by the hand, I was horrible too. And I certainly could have used a strange guy who would talk to me about the man of the stars from the record ring. It would have been a nice thing to believe in.
That Bowie, even while singing about paranoia, that first time at Top of the Pops was pure light. A kind of naive (and fake) innocent madness...in other words, the essence of pop.
But later, it became like a terrible musical...paranoia, sequins, glitter, stage costumes...and image...
Ah, governments should allow pop (or rock, as you please) only to obscure subordinates with anonymous faces...music yes, but without charm...Plato said it too: power to the philosophers and music to the clerks. Can you imagine Morrison or Brian Jones in a trench coat and hat? Maybe with those faces barbers used to put on display in the seventies?
But we were saying about the musical...
Yes, it was just a musical studied down to the smallest detail...is it possible that no one understood?...That the problem was not understanding, the problem was that, even understanding, the fact remained that that album was fantastic...
Oh yes, really fantastic, full of immortal riffs, for example, and glittering epiphanies...the essence of rock inside a soap bubble that never burst. Punk would take care of bursting it...but even punk didn't last a moment...because paranoia, you know, slowly takes over everything and hunts down the few existing lights.
And punk was a great light.
And anyway, "Ziggy" is a great album. The lyrics then are stuff almost too fabulous for that shitty music...
Who, who has ever managed to define the rock star better than Mr. Bowie? Or do you not remember the alien invader described in "Moonage Daydream", the perfect mom/dad for pre-punk kids? Mom/dad as well as rock'n'roll whore, of course. Yeah. Who managed that? No one, no one has ever managed...
Not to mention, even within a rather slapdash plot, the perfect depiction of paranoia (oh God, how many times have I written paranoia?)...
Not to mention that "Rock'n'Roll Suicide" sounds like Jacques Brel... Yes, yes, add the Brel of this song to the rest of the album, which is proto punk, comic book, B-movie, along with sugary melodies...
Not to mention that it's not easy to be both myth and parody...
Not to mention how, at the time, it pissed off prog rockers and hard-core rockers who considered him akin to a buffoon.
In short, a fucking masterpiece...
Babbo Lulù has included this album among the hundred most beautiful in music history, somewhere between sixty and seventy I don't remember well. And he is someone who understands. Then he confided in me, and I'm sure he'll be mad at me for revealing it here, that he would have put it among the top ten.
"Only how can one put a shitty album among the top ten?" Yes, how?
Trallallà...
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