(First part here.)
”I Smiled Sadly”
’Ziggy Stardust’ opens, logically enough, with an announcement of the end of the world: “News had just come over/ We had five years left to cry in”. As the song starts Bowie sounds mournful but strangely resigned. There's none of the “hey man” hep-cat slang that peppers future tracks, the language is direct and even flat.
Mysteriously, the song never spells out just how or why this time limit came to be set. But we're lucky, because at one point Bowie did explain it, when he was being interviewed by William Burroughs:
”Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes 'Starman’, which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch onto it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don't have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping.”
More precisely, we're lucky that this was said three years after the event (and for a musical that never happened), so we don't have to be bothered by any of it. (If you read the whole thing, you can follow him musing about the logistical difficulties associated with putting black holes on stage. While saying “I usually don't agree with what I say very much, I'm an awful liar.”) Just as we're lucky the Orwell estate scuppered his plans for a 'Nineteen Eighty Four' musical, meaning that instead we got 'Diamond Dogs'. Every reference you read to it suggests it would have been to Ziggy what 'Phantom Menace' was to 'Star Wars', elaborations which added nothing and in fact took everything away.
Of course we're better off not knowing. The disaster is like the shadowy monster in shadowy monster films, best kept that way rather than shining a spotlight over an extra sweating in a rubber suit. It’s the unspecified nature which makes the song so haunting and evocative. But there's more, which goes to the core of the concept...
At the time, he was less erudite but probably also less an awful liar:
“It originally started as a concept album, but it kind of got broken up because I found other songs I wanted to put in the album which wouldn't have fitted into the story of Ziggy... it could be within the last five years of Earth... I'm not at all sure... Because I wrote it in such a way that I just dropped the numbers into the album in any order that they cropped up. It depends on which state you listen to it in.”
And notably he doesn't seem to have ever played the songs live in album sequence.
So if Bowie wasn't yet applying Burroughs' cut-ups to his lyrics, he effectively cuts up the album. Every song comes from a different perspective. Though Bowie ‘played’ Ziggy on-stage and even in interviews, and though the majority of the songs are from a first-person perspective, few are from Ziggy’s. ('Star' is a possible exception.) We see him through others’ eyes. The classic line is “Ziggy played guitar” not “I played guitar”. (Just as well, as he wasn’t playing guitar at the time he sang it.)
You could, if you wanted, try to pin each one to it's narrator - 'Starman' to a suburban teen keeping his dreams of “sparkling” from his parents, 'Lady Stardust' an early fan watching others glom on, 'Ziggy Stardust' two rival fans in conflict and so on. But that's not the point. The point isn't where those different perspectives come from, it’s what they add up to. You can examine a mosaic by stepping up close, working out the size and colour of each piece. But the point of a mosaic is to step back, to take in the whole thing impressionistically, individual pieces disappearing into the pattern.
And is this even new? Earlier songs, such as ‘Space Oddity’ or ‘Cygnet Committee’ had been built from multiple points of view. But each character was carefully tagged, most obviously through the radio call signs on ’Space Oddity’. The lyric sheet even helpfully wrapped their speech in inverted commas. But as those epic narratives condensed to hit single length, those identifying tags were lost, long speeches and passage of description were compressed into gnomic aphorisms.
Plus Ziggy himself was a mosaic, a Frankenstein assemblage Bowie made from rock stars already existing. Except when people try to work out his recipe, it always seems dissatisfyingly limiting. Ideally he’d be based on every previous star. Bowie said “it’s an archetype really, it’s the definitive rock ‘n’ roll star. It often happens and I was just trying to document it as such.”
As well he might. Smart, striking-looking, talented… Bowie may have been a natural star. But he was not necessarily a natural rock star. For years he flitted between many paths. So he approached the role as an actor would, studying actual rock stars and copping elements as they struck him.
And before Bowie, appreciation of previous stars was normally expressed through cover versions or copycat numbers. Whereas on his previous album ’Hunky Dory’ Bowie had openly dedicated multiple numbers to his heroes. And he’d go on to use rock imagery, such as “Jagger’s eyes”, the way Romantic poets might have cited Aphrodite.
Plus seeing him through those multiple lines of sight, like a mosaic viewed through a prism, enhances this sense of him as something inscrutably strange, slightly beyond our understanding. Looking back years later, Bowie sounded less interested in Infinites in Greenwich Village:
"I think that probably the best thing I did with Ziggy was to leave himself open-ended. It wasn't a specific story, there were specific incidents... but it wasn't as roundly written as a usual narrative is… because Ziggy was kind of an empty vessel you could put an awful lot of yourself into, being your own version of Ziggy."
And yet the mosaic metaphor's imperfect. Here the pieces are just big enough to suggest they might fit together. We get a fractured perspective on a fractured figure in a fractured situation. And that fracturing is foregrounded. It may be significant that Bowie so frequently described himself as “mixed up”, as a synonym for “troubled”, when he was playing a character who was literally made from a mix.
Google-image “Ziggy Stardust” and most finds will be of the later Aladdin Sane. You can see why. It was all about being iconic and that was the icon that trumped the others. Aladdin was used for the mural made for him in Brixton after his death, he even has a zigzag constellation named after him. That zigzag became his motif, and it couldn’t be more clearly an emblem of a fractured personality.
And the fracturing may even be duplicated in the individual pieces, like Mandlebrots. When people argue over the recipe for Ziggy, the one most overlooked is the least known but possibly the most important. Through the medium of consuming too much acid Vince Taylor had come to believe he was an alien, or Jesus, or possibly an alien Jesus.
Bowie said of him “I’m not sure if I held him up as an idol or as something not to become. Bit of both, probably. There was something very tempting about him going completely over the edge. Especially at my age then, it seemed very appealing: ‘Oh, I’d love to end up like that, totally nuts’. And so he re-emerged into this Ziggy character.” (From Clinton Heylin’s ’All The Madmen’) So Ziggy was based from the off on a broken prototype. Not Jesus but a John the Baptist who predicts himself, and is still proven wrong.
The script that Bowie wrote which called for Ziggy’s rise also had to call for his fall. And it was ever thus. In the Simpsons episode 'The Otto Show' Bart falls into a fantasy where he and Millhouse become rock stars. Before you know it he’s becomes bloated and strung out, lying backstage unable to go on. “You've changed, man”, yells Millhouse. “It used to be about the music.” Returning to reality Bart mouths to himself “cool”.
In rock ‘n’ roll if it’s working, that’s a sign it’s not working. It's meant to end up in failure, the car crashed into the swimming pool not retained and resold for its full market value. So in rock mythology “he took it all too far” is a compliment. 'Rock 'n' Roll Suicide' is always going to trump 'Rock 'n' Roll Retirement With an Superannuated Pension Plan'.
’Ziggy’ is the rock 'n' roll story - rags/riches/rags again – blown up on a more cosmological scale. And if it wasn't rooted in rock 'n' roll, it wouldn't work. We're like a tribal group told a new iteration of its core myths. Just a few key words and phrases is enough.
Which is why, in the moment of listening to it, Ziggy seems to make total sense. It’s only when you try to focus on it that it slips away. Because in a way we don't need to be told the story of Ziggy. We already knew it, from the very beginning, without even thinking about it.
And so rock music becomes almost innately built on a paradox, between the rock star as icon of cool and as shunned outcast. As Lennon said "Part of me suspects I'm a loser and part of me thinks I'm God Almighty,” no messing with Mr. Inbetween. Ziggy himself epitomises the ambiguity, built around the oxymoron of “a leper messiah”. And one way of resolving that paradox is to make it into a timeline, into a rise and fall.
And so, though Ziggy’s fall is telegraphed in the title its passing is barely recounted. It comes in the middle of the song ’Ziggy Stardust’, intercut with the triumphant. We’re expected to intuit these are two contrasting voices, the euphoric fan interrupted by the more cynical protopunk asking what the Spiders have done for them lately.
He “make[s] love to his ego”, the kids fall out of love with him, “kill the man”, “break up the band” and leave him alone and despondent. Or something like that. (It’s not clear how any of that happens, or even who turns against who first. Or how you can develop a messiah complex when you’re already a messiah.) And that was one of the songs demoed even before 'Hunky Dory', suggesting that however much it's elided over Ziggy's fall had been hardwired into the thing from the start.
Whereas in ’Lady Stardust’, just as we're being told of Ziggy's ascendancy the tone is elegiac, almost mournful, someone looking back on those happier times. The past tense seems important. The payoff line is “I smiled sadly for a love I could not obey”.
”Pushing Through the Market Square...”
So in short 'Five Years' makes no sense and was never intended to... well, perhaps in a way it does. But, despite the “Earth really dying” line, what it suggests is social not ecological collapse. The patchwork array of people in the street come off as disconnected, linked only by hearing the news guy's words. Reduced to a series of pronouned types, (“a girl my age... the black... the cop”) just like the agglomeration of discrete objects that assail the narrator (“boys, toys, electric irons and TVs”) all apparently walking single file, each internalising the portentous warning.
The most obvious assumption is that they act in this way in response to the news guy's words, shocked out of the ability to look one another in the eye. But what if the situation is the other way up? The news guy isn’t relaying to but reporting what’s happening in the street, that we can no longer relate to each other, that social breakdown is literal - it’s simply stopped functioning at the most fundamental level, and now each and every one of us is alone.
“I felt like an actor” should be a positive line, another iteration of the Glam credo about reinventing yourself. Here it's reversed. Everyone in the song is an actor without an audience, reduced to a role and trapped within it. Only the social outcasts, “the black” and “the queer” respond to what anyone else is doing – which in the queer’s case is throwing up.
With the line “never thought I’d need so many people” it’s the ‘need’ which sticks out. We’re expecting ‘see’, maybe ‘meet’, not so strong a term. Its people who are the problem here. But also, potentially, the solution. “My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare” is about carrying the image of that fractured world in your mind, with no way to interact with it. Bowie said, if years later, “I'm feeling like a society in myself. So broken up and fragmented.”
And, you may ask, how does this theory explain the five year time limit? The answer to that is it doesn't really. But then that's happily forgotten from this point anyway. What it does convey is how it can feel to push your way through a crowded street, your brain auto-assigning descriptive tags to those you pass as if that helps you navigate them. Like you're a cut-out piece stuck in a collage, unable either to cross the bifurcating scalpel lines and interact with the other pieces or to remove yourself from them.
Bowie’s often said to have countered the collectivised radicalism of the Sixties, to be about individual self-transformation. But this is a song about the downside of individualism, the perils of too much of the heady stuff. He often said himself that he primarily wrote about alienation. But perhaps never more so than here.
”Ripping off Stars From His Face”
And, with the world collapsing around you, what’s left to do but act cool?
The album contains an out-and-out filler track, which doesn't even tangentially relate to the Ziggy concept – 'It Ain't Easy'. (Already rejected from 'Hunky Dory', it should have been knocked back again.) So it might seem a shame that a classic song which did (sort of) fit the concept got left off the album. Of course this is ’All The Young Dudes’, which Bowie gave to Mott the Hoople. (Some claim he wrote them the song on the spot.)
In fact, much like the musical getting aborted, it's the hidden hand of fate at work. Firstly, it was too similar to the album to actually find a place on it. Too many motifs recur – television men, suicide and so on. Chronologically it would have had to come before the Starman landed, but would then risk vying with 'Five Years'.
But more importantly Ian Hunter sung Bowie's song better than he would himself. Bowie would have sung it poignantly and theatrically, pretty much the same way as 'Five Years'. Hunter just sounds jaded, soured on life. (Though Bowie did perform the song live, he never released a recording of it until a 1995 compilation album.)
So what’s so cool about Cool? It could be seen as just a more condensed word for people who can't be bothered to say insouciant. Except that ignores the term’s origins:
”The sum and substance of cool is a self-conscious aplomb in overall behavior… Cool was once an attitude fostered by rebels and underdogs, such as slaves, prisoners, bikers and political dissidents, etc., for whom open rebellion invited punishment, so it hid defiance behind a wall of ironic detachment, distancing itself from the source of authority rather than directly confronting it.”
(And yes, it doesn’t count as cool to look up what Wikipedia says about cool.) Hence affected nonchalance became important enough as a survival strategy to acquire an almost spiritual devotion. Baudrillard described cool as “aestheticised nihilism”.
In fact, in today’s bid for Pseud’s Corner I’m going to suggest this song suggests a dialectical relationship. In one sense it’s acknowledging the hopeless situation society has pushed upon you. (As in the immortal line “is there concrete all around/ Or is it in my head?”) But being a “dude” is also an avowal, something taken up akin to being a monk, and so becomes your source of inner strength. (“That revolution stuff” of the previous decade is specifically rejected.) Which creates the paradox – you pose as if your very life depended on it.
To get more reductive about it than we probably should, the verses are a list of individuals feeling that concrete all around. (It starts with a planned suicide.) While the more euphoric chorus involves the dudes banding together. Even the recorded version carries instructions as if to a live audience - “I want you at the front”.
Rags are the New Riches
I once watched one of those BBC4 music histories which cheerfully rolled out the old saw about music not reflecting the lives of alienated urban youth before punk came along. Scarcely ten minutes after they’d actually played ’All The Young Dudes’.
Glam was naked aspirational, and often that meant a chance to do some social climbing. It involved many figures from working class backgrounds who affected middle class accents. Take for example Brian Ferry, son of a Geordie miner who took on a gentleman-about-town persona. Punk might seem the very opposite of all that. We could counter Ferry with Joe Strummer, ex-public school boy who learnt to drop his H’s in the newfound impolite company.
Nevertheless this still was the promissory note Punk inherited from Glam, embodied in Rotten's clarion cry “you don't need permission for anything!” If it replaced dressing up with dressing down, it took up dressing down as if it was dressing up, rags paraded like they were riches. Glitzy alter egos like Stardust and Glitter were swapped for ersatz names like Poly Styrene.
And the connection’s possibly at its clearest here. The “ripping off stars from his face” already seems Punk’s ostensible anti-Glam. While the discarding of the Beatles and Stones seems to presage the Clash’s “no Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones.” In fact the Clash were such fans they brought in Hoople’s producer Guy Stevens for ’London Calling’. (Though perhaps the bizzarest connection is anarcho-punk fundamentalists Crass naming themselves after a ’Ziggy Stardust’ lyric “the kids were just crass.”)
Last part incoming...
No comments:
Post a Comment