1972. Man has gone to the moon, the Cold War has reached space. The Beatles are no more, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin are dead, the flowers of flower Energy have withered and Pink Floyd is one step closer to becoming stars with The Dark Side Of The Moon album. The times are tense and dystopian, but in England there are those who have fun. Glam rock, the latest musical sensation, conquers, with sparkles and androgyny, all too young to have been hippies. The provocation goes far beyond the immediate effect of the songs, questioning gender, sexuality, norms of behavior and fashion. By now, everyone is more or less used to seeing handsome, long-haired, feminine-looking men on magazine covers and on television screens. T Rex’s Marc Bolan is already a star, and before him, even Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant had already confused a lot of people with long blond curls and an open shirt. But that strangely made-up figure, red hair, platform heels and tight clothes… Is it a man? A woman? A being from space?
Many people will have wondered that when they saw Ziggy Stardust for the first time, in 1972. I wondered, years later, already in the middle of new wave, when I saw the first photos of him at that time, serving as an inspiration for bands like Duran Duran or Visage. The answer, of course, lay in the question: Was Ziggy, male, female, and alien all in one, or none at all, a galactic rock star who intended to save the world but ended up a victim of ego? Nowadays it seems a bit silly to create such a character to make a record with rock opera aspirations, but back in the ’70s, this sort of thing was often part of the concept, and concepts were taken very seriously at the time. Bowie wasn’t the only one, or even the first, to invent another self and adopt a sci-fi narrative, progressive rock was full of that. Androgyny may not have been Ziggy’s secret weapon either, Bowie himself was already known before for encoding codes evoking, for example, Marlene Dietrich in the Hunky Dory photos, released a year before Ziggy Stardust was born. On the other hand, there were other eccentric pop stars, dressed in girly clothes and makeup, but neither Marc Bolan nor Brian Eno (then at Roxy Music), dressed in tigress and with eyeliner and glitter they managed to get close to the Bowie effect like Ziggy Stardust.
This article is exclusive to our subscribers: subscribe now and benefit from unlimited reading and other benefits. If you are already a subscriber, log in here. If you think this message is an error, please contact our customer service.
Source: Observadora
