Aliens in Music – Ziggy Stardust

Steph P. Bianchini January 11, 2016 4 Comments

Today Ziggy Stardust left planet Earth for an unknown destination – probably a far away galaxy. His human host, David Bowie “died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer“, as his son Duncan Jones declared on social media.

Impossible to express in a blogpost what this amazing artist meant for million people like me, born when he was already a star and that have grown up with his songs and shows and fantastic characters.

What I can say is that David Bowie probably represented the best and most refined example of SFF in music, “the ultimate shape-shifter”  as Bridget McGovern defined him in her articles on Tor.com. To me, he has been more than that – he has personified “the alien”, the Man that Fell to Earth – like the character of Nicholas Roeg’s movie Bowie played in 1976 (see more about it here). And the attention to the human adventure in space has been a constant in his career – always a step ahead the others. Space Oddity was his first, great success – released as a single in July 1969 (not a coincidence) – and since then Major Tom has become a recurrent feature in his work (Ashes to Ashes is an example for all).

Life on Mars, in 1972 – often considered his best song ever – is highly symbolic, surreal and not many people have understood it completely. I didn’t, for instance, when I discovered it as a child: it was a just a great tune that talked about the Red Planet, and reminded me of the Martian Chronicles we were reading after school. But it brought space in our home, again. And then, Ziggy Stardust landed, with his Spiders from Mars. The full-embodied alien, the space invader, the rock’n’rollin’ bitch with ray-guns and electric eyes, like in the immortal Moonage Daydream he was still singing twenty years later in his concerts.

“Ziggy really set the pattern for my future work. Ziggy was my Martian messiah who twanged a guitar. He was a simplistic character. I saw him as very simple….fairly like the character Newton I was to do in the film [The Man Who Fell to Earth] later on. Someone who was dropped down here, got brought down to our way of thinking and ended up destroying himself. I fell for Ziggy too. It was quite easy to become obsessed night and day with the character.

I became Ziggy Stardust. David Bowie went totally out the window. Everybody was convincing me that I was a Messiah, especially on that first American tour. I got hopelessly lost in the fantasy.” (David Bowie, 1976)

Ziggy was the first, and certainly not the last of David Bowie’s personages – but was one (to me) more inspiring and positive than others (which I loved nonetheless, no matter their darkness, like the Thin White Duke of Berlin’s years). It was, especially, SF made music, and something to be reckoned with for all successive artists. A point of no return. If memory is the only kind of immortality available to creatures, well, Ziggy has fully qualified for it – on planet Earth, at least.

And what about David, the man, who was something distinct from Ziggy and the other characters? I have to say one thing has always struck me about him more than anything – his longevity and his inner balance that has allowed him to survive and keep changing when others crashed and burned. He made through depression, cocaine-addition and stardom, like a phoenix from a pyre. That reminds me of the lyrics of one of his songs –  “Who knows? /Not me / I never lost control / You’re face to face / With the man who sold the world.”  He might have not sold the world, after all, but he has certainly conquered and dazzled it.

For some great pictures and key moments of David’s life, see this BBC gallery “A life in pictures“: and don’t be ashamed if you cry.