The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars by David Bowie

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, David Bowie's fifth studio album, hit the shops on RCA in June 1972, and it's the record where Bowie turned himself into a creature from another planet. He produced it with Ken Scott at Trident Studios in London between November 1971 and February 1972, backed by the Spiders from Mars: Mick Ronson on guitar, Trevor Bolder on bass and Mick Woodmansey on drums.

It's a loose rock opera about Ziggy, an androgynous, bisexual rock star sent down to Earth as a savior with the apocalypse on its way, who wins the kids' hearts and then gets eaten alive by his own ego. Most of that story was stitched together after the songs were already cut, and it hardly matters: the songs carry it. "Five Years" is a slow march toward doomsday, "Starman" is a glittering beacon of pop, "Moonage Day Dream" and "Ziggy Stardust" crunch with Ronson's glam-sharp guitar, "Hang On to Yourself" and "Suffragette City" tear loose with proto-punk swagger, and "Rock-N-Roll Suicide" is a grand, cracked, arms-wide farewell. The glam and proto-punk moves owe debts to Marc Bolan, Iggy Pop and the Velvet Underground, and the lyrics poke at rock's artifice, politics, drugs, sex and fame.

It reached the top five in the UK, and a Top of the Pops performance of "Starman" in early July 1972 made Bowie a star overnight. Ziggy stayed alive for the tour that followed, and Bowie summed up the next album, Aladdin Sane, as "Ziggy goes to America". It entered the National Recording Registry in 2017.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.