occasional dream, eight

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is all about flaming out, the art of burning out as opposed to fading away. The music imagines a five-year window within which one could exhaust everything, leaving nothing in the tank for later on. Five years to ignore consequences, to be blinkered to social and moral implications, to test boundaries. Forty-years later, we live in a world of self-conscious paralysis and constraint. The idea of a world without limits seems quaint, yet somehow the record still sounds so fresh and relevant. There’s no doubt in my mind that one of the keys to its enduring power is the fleeting taste it gives us of the good life we once had. There’s certainly an underlying feeling of tragedy for me every time I play it. Bowie is so good at creating that complicated fusion of pleasure and pathos. It seems to be built in to his songwriting DNA. Think of Space Oddity, recorded three years or so earlier, the ecstasy of those beautiful chords, of floating in a most peculiar way, but knowing that the story has a very unhappy ending. Can you hear me Major Tom? Ziggy begins with this complex of emotions and then pushes them a few steps further, refracting them through an incredibly astute reading of the music’s own moment in history. The record emerges out of the rubble of 60s idealism. In a sense, Bowie’s conceptual raw material is the residue of 60s idealism after the ideals have been pushed to the point where they turn back on themselves. It’s the old cliché your grandfather tells you when you’re a little kid: 'There’s no such thing as a free lunch.’ Maybe so, but Ziggy’s main conceit seems to be that you can live as if the lunch were free and then simply die when the bill comes due. You’ve got five years of free lunch, and then – bang! – it’s time to check out. It’s not a life trajectory for everybody, but some would rather have five years of no limits than a full lifetime of boring restraints. It’s a complicated calculus we’re all faced with, this trade-off between the pleasure and reality principles. When I hear Mick Woodmansey's slow, perfectly syncopated drums at the open of Ziggy – and I love the way you can hear the squeak of his floor pedal hitting the bass drum – I feel like what I imagine a junkie feels like right before he’s about to get his fix. (There’s a reason drug dealers say, ‘the first one is free.’) I know this is another story that ends badly, but I can’t help myself because it just sounds so fucking good. There’s no resisting it. It gets me to thinking that five years is a long time, isn’t it? But really, I’m dominated by the reality principle. I don’t have a libertine spirit at all. I’m always worried about my future. I try to live safely, to neither get too high nor go too low, to minimize the potential damage, to limit liability, to save some for a rainy day. Ziggy introduces me to a different way of life. It’s not a one I could ever adopt, but when I hear those opening drums I understand its appeal completely, and for the next thirty-five minutes or so I experience what it’s like to be free…