Employing the device of the alien has become a favoured tactic of many, but in 1972 it was an unusual move when semi-unknown musician David Bowie did it. Creating a concept album focussing on an alien visitor known as Ziggy Stardust, Bowie also took on the persona of this Ziggy Stardust conflating any sense of border between himself and the character. Briefly, the plot of the story told through the songs is that Earth is going to end in five years, when Ziggy Stardust arrives from space, becomes a rock star and ends up committing suicide due to the pressure and frustration of being just such a rock star. Although it is left implied, it appears that Earth is saved by the coming of Ziggy Stardust and does not die in the end.
It is not the story as such, however, which is of interest here, but more the use of the Ziggy Stardust character and how it mixed with Bowie’s star persona, as well as the major theme of the album, which is one of transformation and transgression. There are two main threads here, regarding the narrativization of identity: Bowie’s relation to Ziggy and the Bowie/Ziggy construct’s relation to ‘his’ fans.
The use of quotations marks around ‘his’ is no accident; the most clearly transgressive move with the Ziggy character is the fact that s/he is presented as androgynous and gender specification is unclear, possibly even transsexual. While Bowie is obviously male, in the context of the album and the shows performed, he takes on aspects of Ziggy. It is this ambiguous relation to both gender and the character of Ziggy Stardust which turned out to be so ingenious.
Through the image of the alien, Bowie creates an identity where there are few pre-defined rules and manages to place the Ziggy icon both inside and outside cultural discourse. The alien – as a cultural sign – is of course a stranger, something beyond the normal and precisely what plays the Other to a culture’s Same. The typical status of the alien is thus marginal, even as it helps us construct our own sense of self. The strategy which Bowie used, however, was to construct the Ziggy identity as an opposition to ‘parent culture’ – in this case quite literally – so that the teenagers would come to identify with Ziggy simply on the basis of ‘his’ opposition to dominant culture.
The heavy use of make-up, the androgynous appearance and way of dressing, the sexual overtones as well as the inherently exotic look of Bowie himself (due to a childhood eye-injury), all came together to generate a star persona incomprehensible by standard definitions of behaviour, and quite deliberately so. In the songs, Ziggy is represented as a benign creature who not only prevents the Earth’s destruction, but also provides release and escape for the ‘kids’. In the song ‘Starman’ one kid experiences hearing Ziggy on the radio “I leaned back on my radio / Some cat was layin’ down some rock’n’roll ‘lotta soul, he said / Then the loud sound did seem to fade / Came back like a slow voice on a wave of phase / That weren’t no D.J. that was hazy cosmic jive”. Here we see how Ziggy is slowly taking over the air waves with ‘his’ hazy cosmic jive, and later we hear that “He’d like to come and meet us / But he thinks he’d blow our minds / There’s a starman waiting in the sky / He’s told us not to blow it / Cause he knows it’s all worthwhile”.
Apparently, Ziggy has a desire to come to Earth but fears whether or not people could in fact understand his alien being, which is made quite explicit in the next song “Lady Stardust”:
People stared at the makeup on his face
Laughed at his long black hair, his animal grace
The boy in the bright blue jeans
Jumped up on the stage
And lady stardust sang his songs
Of darkness and disgrace
The gender-bending lyrics here give us an indication of why Ziggy would blow people’s mind, something which was obviously occurring in parallel with Bowie at the same time. In “Starman” the kids are fully aware that this is not something parents are going to approve of: “If we can sparkle he may land tonight / Don’t tell your poppa or he’ll get us locked up in fright”. It does, however, seem slightly unclear exactly what Ziggy’s message is, other than gender-confusing and a desire to change things through rock’n’roll. Becoming a rock star is obviously Ziggy’s main motivation.
In an ironic interplay of the multiple meanings of the word ‘star’ as both a cultural star – a celebrity – and as the home of extra-terrestrials, Bowie creates a double-bind which positions the alien as something enticing and desirable, not something to be feared by the kids or teenagers but instead something to strive towards – to become a star oneself, to become an exotic and exciting Other. The subject position of the alien is suddenly no longer purely negatively envisioned, but instead holds a certain romantic notion. The alien has become re-signified, detourned, as a strategy of resistance to the norms of society, while at the same time being romanticized for the kids.
This romantic connotation can also be heard in the music. Music is difficult to deal with as music in cultural analytic terms since no critical vocabulary has been established for it, but we can note the basics here without extending into musical theory or practice. The music is a hybrid mix of styles, blending folk rock with flourishing stringworks, pipe sections, acoustic guitars, piano parts and hard rock guitar riffs inspired by bands such as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Bowie’s voice often approaches falsetto, though not exclusively. For lack of a better word, much of the music has a certain theatricality to it, blended with very to-the-point riffs.
Borrowing elements from progressive rock, there is a degree of ephemeral sound added to some of the songs as ambient moods coming from seemingly nowhere. This lends the album a degree of otherworldliness, providing another layer for the music which is clearly best viewed as a bricolage style. Combined with Bowie’s almost feminine acoustic guitar and fey voice, Mick Ronson’s heavy guitar stand not only in stark contrast but puts into play the very same play between masculine and feminine which the Ziggy character also employs. The trademark riffs on ‘Moonage Daydream’ and ‘Ziggy Stardust’ pretty much defined not only the glam rock movement, but also took what was often considered the more masculine forms of rock (sometimes referred to as cock rock), and inserted into a far more ambiguous relation.
The music on the album thus stands parallel to the visual style of primarily Ziggy but of all the members of the band, referred to as The Spiders From Mars thus emphasising the otherworldly elements of this act’s construction. By being aliens and Martians, a discourse was created which made the gender-confusing more acceptable in one way – as the gesture removed Ziggy and the Spiders from typical conventions by casting them as outsiders – but also confronted the parent generation head on by stating that their kids were aliens to them.
In this way, Ziggy saves the Earth for ‘he’ points to a path for the kids to follow, and while Ziggy himself dies in the end, his music will live on. This is where the story of Ziggy employs a well-known narrative; that of the Messiah coming to rescue humanity and must do so through his own death and sacrifice. Referred to explicitly as a “leper messiah” in the song “Ziggy Stardust” it becomes evident that here Bowie draws on the well-established narrative of Christ and his sacrifice, in the way that Hebdige refers to as transmitting some of the preferred meanings of dominant culture. (Hebdige, 1988: 86). Yet Ziggy is a leper messiah in two ways. The first is for the parent generation where their ideology – the narrative of Christ – is suddenly detourned to instead create a strategy for resistance by casting a rock’n’roll star as a new Messiah and thus saving the kids from the same fate as their parents.
The second way, is how Ziggy’s story shows that there is also a darker side to being a rock star; it is in itself a form of alienation. In the song “Star” we hear “I could make a transformation as a rock & roll star / So inviting – so enticing to play the part”, seemingly fully realizing that being a rock star is simply an act, a construction in other words. Much of the Ziggy album thus partakes in the an Andy Warholesque conception of fame as every person’s right. Fame becomes conceived as liberating, just as the alien identity does. As Suzanne Rintoul points out, Ziggy Stardust was constructed through the album to already be a rock superstar. Not only is Ziggy an alien, ‘he’ is also famous world wide and the songs relate how the fictional fans react to him (Rintoul, 2004: 2).
This ingenious move was, I will argue, the very reason why the album and Bowie became such an influence and so popular. It was not the simple move of simply pretending to be famous and so – in a hyperreal move – actually becoming so, but rather the way in which the story of Ziggy was constructed. Ziggy becomes a story which the fans can easily make their own and through this narrative construct their own sense of self, by partaking in the (virtual) community which the album creates, thus making it factual and real.
The album invites participation from the fans, evident in lines such as “If we can sparkle he may land tonight” which shows how the fans must actively do something for Ziggy to appear. In other words, Ziggy is made by the fans and is therefore a part of their life and their community. He is what they make of him, for it is only through them that he really exists as a rock star.
By casting the alien Ziggy as a romantic outsider, Bowie shapes a story, a form of narrative which the kids can step freely into and make their own. In many ways the Ziggy character is the same kind of empty signifier which sf employs constantly; since Ziggy has no distinct motivation it becomes possible for kids to use Ziggy as a kind of blank narrative that they can model to their own identity. Ziggy’s character simply forges a space for kids to fill. Put slightly differently, Ziggy is a literalization of the kids’ sense of alienation. He is alien because that is how they feel – as different, Other, to their parents which seems to be a constant for teenagers. By making the alien exciting and exotic rather than dangerous, Bowie/Ziggy romanticises being an outsider and casts it as a desirable position.
All forms of transgression becomes permissible within the ‘Ziggy paradigm’ since normal conventions do not apply to outsiders. Ziggy narrates difference and narrates a different identity. However, it is also clear that with the popularity gained by Ziggy a kind of counter-reaction was bound to happen, and what was originally marginal became mainstream. Although a specific break-point is difficult to specify, it is evident that at some point Ziggy’s difference was recuperated into being Same once again. Confining Ziggy to clubs and concert halls becomes a way of limiting and setting up borders around the phenomenon and so recuperates the strategy into dominant culture once more. The Ziggy shows, as they became ever more popular became greater and greater spectacles and thus became trivialized in Hebdige’s terms (Hebdige, 1988: 97). Bowie had perhaps shown foresight in narrating the fall of Ziggy within the terms of the album and chose to end the shows at the height of its popularity.
It is still quite evident, however, that the album and the character of Ziggy became a narrative strategy for resistance, employing the device of the alien to strengthen the concept of the outsider. This identification with Bowie as some form of alien is something which has been part and parcel of his career, even before the release of Ziggy Stardust. His first hit “Space Oddity” was re-released in a new version in 1969 to coincide with the Apollo moon landing, and was even featured on BBC’s coverage of this event. Bowie’s appearance in Nicholas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth has many parallels to Ziggy Stardust but without the rock star aspect. Similar scenarios have been adopted by Bowie later, such as on his 1995 album Outside with the song “Hello Spaceboy” and 1997’s Earthling album which can be understood as aliens watching the strange life of earthlings.
Bowie’s star identity is thus closely connected to the image of the alien, and has provided him with an almost unlimited permission to constantly change and transform his star persona, since he is already viewed as being outside the mainstream of music culture, while in many ways being firmly lodged within it. This fact is perhaps the final evidence of how much we view other people’s identity in narrative terms and how specific narratives guide our understanding of them.