The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars Review

The legend is the persona and the year Bowie spent unable to put it down. The record itself is tighter and warmer than that story suggests. Mick Ronson is the engine here: his guitar tone is thick and unfashionably melodic, his string arrangements on Five Years and Lady Stardust are the reason the ballads land, and the band plays with the compression of a group that has been on the road together.

The concept is famously loose, and critics have never stopped pointing out that the narrative only half exists, arriving in fragments while the songs get on with being songs. It does not matter much. Starman, Moonage Daydream, Suffragette City and Rock and Roll Suicide are a run of singles pretending to be an album, and the character gives them a reason to sit together and an ending to arrive at.

What survives is the idea underneath: that a rock singer is a role you can write, inhabit and then vacate, which reset what a pop career was allowed to look like and is still being used by people who have never heard the record. Fifty years of critical writing puts it near the top of its decade, and the playing holds up better than most of what surrounds it there.