by Marcella Ortega
Daily Lobo
I've always had trouble placing music in categories.
This could be attributed to my parent's diverse taste and my mother's disgust in people who claimed they only listen to one genre. Of the many artists played persistently and blasted into my 3-year-old ears, David Bowie is one of my favorites because he is beyond the constraints of a category. At the time "Let's Dance" was huge, and the flamboyant artist once again managed to please the public with another recreation of himself. Those were the '80s and it seems that is the David Bowie most people remember, but it is by no means what defines the extraordinary artist.
In June of 1972, Bowie released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars. The album is borderline rock-opera as it tells the futuristic story of Bowie's alter-ego Ziggy Stardust and his rise to stardom with the help of his martian band the Spiders, the alter-ego of his real-life bandmates. At the time, Bowie had just joined up with three members of the punk band Ronno, and the combination was flawless.
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The story begins with the echo-like track "Five Years." It introduces the listener to the futuristic setting as Ziggy tells of people's reaction to the world ending in five years. In its slow progression into a harder rock style, the album features love songs such as the laid back "Soul Love" and the more extravagant "Moonage Daydream," with its powerful guitar that combines perfectly with the piano melody.
The track "Lady Stardust" describes the experience of the strange performer in his rise to superstardom. The ballad tells of an eccentric character who is seen as odd by most people, but plays on with his band anyway and sings all night. The image he creates is reflective of Bowie himself, being flamboyant yet captivating.
In Ziggy's height of stardom come the more fast-paced rock songs. From the tracks "Star" to "Hang On To Yourself," the album moves from a more classic rock sound into a punk-like aura. The track "Suffragette City," certainly one of the most memorable on the album, combines punk chords with a blaring saxophone, and displays Bowie's ability to adopt different sounds and make them phenomenal.
The fall of Ziggy Stardust is illustrated in the track "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide." Of course it seems a bit extreme, but this is Bowie, and extravagance is the man's art. The song combines a simple melody accompanied by a dramatic saxophone, and describes the struggles of an old musician.
The thing that makes this album so different is the way Bowie really puts himself into it. He crosses the line between fiction and reality as he lived out his own rise with the release of the album. To most narrow-minded conservative people, a man like Bowie would seem like a freak whose art is beyond comprehension, but to the rest of the population that is not infected with the disease of homophobia or the fear of a sexually ambiguous character, the man's work should prove to be more astonishing than even he thinks. He makes it impossible to be placed in a genre because you can't categorize something that's out of this world.
