In 1972, David Bowie became Ziggy Stardust, releasing the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Or maybe Bowie had been Ziggy Stardust all along, and he just pretends to be Bowie in order to hide the fact that he is in fact an emissary from an alien race meant to spread a message of love and hope to a dying world. I could see a case to be made for that being actually true.
But assuming we live in a boring and mundane world in which David Bowie is not actually an alien, the song Starman was the centerpiece of the concept album about the last rock star living in the waning days of a dying Earth who is part of a society that doesn't care about rock music, or really much of anything else any more. Ziggy is struggling until he is chosen by aliens to revive the flagging hopes of humanity as it faces its very last days. Well, sort of. The aliens in question don't really seem to offer much hope when they arrive, and things turn out badly for Ziggy, but that's in the later part of the story. When the song Starman arrives in the tale, it is a beacon of hope amidst the sad dystopian landscape of Earth.
Previous Musical Monday: Space Oddity by David Bowie
Subsequent Musical Monday: The Middle by the Doubleclicks
David Bowie Musical Monday Home
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