Concept
The album presents, albeit vaguely, the story of a rock and roll character called "Ziggy Stardust". Ziggy is the human manifestation of an alien being who is attempting to present humanity with a message of hope in the last five years of its existence. Ziggy Stardust is the definitive rock star: sexually promiscuous, wild in drug intake and with a message, ultimately, of peace and love; but he is destroyed both by his own excesses, and by the fans he inspired.
The character of Ziggy was inspired by British rock 'n' roll singer Vince Taylor whom Bowie met after Taylor had had a breakdown and believed himself to be a cross between a god and an alien; though Taylor was only part of the blueprint for the character, other influences included the Legendary Stardust Cowboy and Kansai Yamamoto, who designed the costumes Bowie wore during the tour. The Ziggy Stardust name came partly from the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and partly, as Bowie told Rolling Stone, because Ziggy was "one of the few Christian names I could find beginning with the letter 'Z'". He later explained in a 1990 interview for Q Magazine that the Ziggy part came from a tailor's shop called Ziggy's that he passed on a train, and he liked it because it had "that Iggy connotation but it was a tailor's shop, and I thought, Well, this whole thing is gonna be about clothes, so it was my own little joke calling him Ziggy. So Ziggy Stardust was a real compilation of things."
Bowie covered a Legendary Stardust Cowboy song, "I Took a Trip (On a Gemini Spaceship)" thirty years later on Heathen.
Read more about this topic: The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars
Famous quotes containing the word concept:
“Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the Establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality, but to those of another.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn’t like jam if it didn’t, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn’t like truth if it wasn’t sticky, if, from time to time, it didn’t ooze blood.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Teaching Black Studies, I find that students are quick to label a black person who has grown up in a predominantly white setting and attended similar schools as “not black enough.” ...Our concept of black experience has been too narrow and constricting.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)