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David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust (Ryko) (1972)

Track listing:
  1. Five Years 4:42
  2. Soul Love 3:34
  3. Moonage Daydream 4:37
  4. Starman 4:16
  5. It Ain't Easy 3:00
  6. Lady Stardust 3:21
  7. Star 2:47
  8. Hang Onto Yourself 2:39
  9. Ziggy Stardust 3:13
  10. Suffragette City 3:25
  11. Rock 'N' Roll Suicide 3:02
  12. John, I'm Only Dancing (Previously unreleased mix) 2:46
  13. Velvet Goldmine (Single B-side) 3:12
  14. Sweet Head (Previously unreleased track) 4:17
  15. Ziggy Stardust (Previously unreleased original demo) 3:39
  16. Lady Stardust (Previously unreleased original demo) 3:34

Notes


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 & 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 Ziggy Stardust sounds so foreign. Bowie succeeds not in spite of his pretensions but because of them, and Ziggy Stardust — familiar in structure, but alien in performance — is the first time his vision and execution met in such a grand, sweeping fashion.