On this day (May 16) in 1972, David Bowie released his fifth studio album. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars saw Bowie taking on the role of an androgynous bisexual rockstar from outer space. The album’s loose concept tracks Ziggy Stardust’s arrival on Earth, his rise to fame, and his downfall due to his overblown ego.
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Today, Bowie’s 1972 LP is hailed as one of the greatest and most influential albums ever released. Its blend of proto-punk and glam rock made waves in the early ’70s rock world. Fans, critics, and fellow artists raved over the instrumentation, songwriting, and storytelling captured on the record. Strangely, though, it was only a minor hit outside the United Kingdom. It went to No. 5 on the official UK Albums Chart. However, it failed to break into the top 10 anywhere else. It came close in Australia, where it peaked at No. 11. At the same time, it failed to break the top 20 of the Billboard 200 in the United States, peaking at No. 21.
The album didn’t just introduce the world to Bowie’s most iconic persona. It also contained a handful of truly timeless tunes. The album contains “Suffragette City,” “Starman,” “Moonage Daydream,” and several other tracks that remain popular more than five decades later.
David Bowie Reflects on Ziggy Stardust
David Bowie introduced Ziggy Stardust around the same time that Alice Cooper’s career was gaining momentum. As a result, people started to lump Bowie in with the shock rocker. In an interview for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, he revealed he wasn’t surprised by the comparison. “I kind of expected all that to happen. And, I just trusted in my own conceptions that eventually we’d split off and have separate identities, Alice and myself,” he said. “I just trusted in my own optimistic ideas of what I could do.”
Bowie further explained the importance of characters like Ziggy Stardust for his creative output. “I don’t think I have to exert myself so much to explain that I am not part of rock and roll. I have my own identity. I just use rock and roll,” he said. “I had to be very exaggerated in the beginning to defy people to put me into a category, so that that would leave me room to work in,” he added.
“I wanted to define the archetype of messiah rockstar. That’s all I wanted to do,” he said of the idea behind Ziggy Stardust. “I used the trappings of Kabuki theater, mime technique, fringe New York music–my references were Velvet Underground and whatever,” he explained. “It was a British view of American street energy.”
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