Headphone Echoes: Ziggy Stardust and the Art of VanishingBefore David Bowie became a chameleon, he became a shield.The Last WireThe Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is not an album about science fiction. It is an album about distance. Distance between the artist and the audience. Distance between the self and the emotions that threaten to overwhelm it. Distance as survival.
Brian Wilson taught popular music how to engineer vulnerability. The Beatles taught it how to scale that vulnerability without collapse. The Who taught it how to sustain vulnerability through narrative. Bowie learned something darker. He learned how to disappear inside it.
Ziggy is not a character for theatrical flair. Ziggy is a containment system.
By 1972, the lesson of
Pet Sounds had already spread through rock culture. Emotional ambition was no longer optional. Albums were expected to mean something. Artists were expected to reveal themselves. But the cost was becoming visible. Wilson had cracked. Lennon was unraveling publicly. Townshend was writing himself into corners he could not easily escape.
Bowie was watching all of it.
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