Why David Bowie Killed Ziggy Stardust, 50 Years Ago Today
variety.comJem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Fifty years ago today, on the stage of London’s Hammersmith Odeon, David Bowie killed Ziggy Stardust.
Of course, it was not a conventional murder: Ziggy was Bowie’s creation, a character he’d created, a vessel for his rise to fame behind his blockbuster 1972 album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” which led to one of the fastest and most meteoric rises to superstardom in pop-culture history and created something of a self-fulfilling paradigm, involving the rise of the titular rock star whose fame went to his head and maybe died, maybe didn’t.
After nearly a decade of trying and mostly failing to become famous as himself, Bowie apparently figured it might be easier to do it as someone else — as a “totally credible plastic rock star,” as he would later describe it.
He was right. Within 18 months, Bowie had rocketed from a one-hit wonder to one of the most iconic pop stars the world had ever seen, with some of the greatest music of the era.
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