Rock Musician David Bowie

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the concept album "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" by David Bowie, the self-made man who is famous for his fleeting construction of personas, changed the way heavy metal, hard rock, punk music, glam rock and progressive rock sounded. The author points out that David Bowie's teenage wilderness years coincided with the gold-lame era of vintage rock 'n' roll, which reached England in the late 1950s in the form of American hip-swinging, lip-curling singers giving vent to youthful frustrations in a way seen as morally threatening such as Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog", Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill" and Little Richard. The paper states that the album represented the archetypal rise and fall of the world of pop, which recently had experienced a sense of lost with the breakup of the Beatles and, with them, the cheery innocence of the 1960's; thereby, Ziggy became for many people the missing link between American punk and tight Beatle melodies.

From the Paper:

"Kenneth Pitt first entered Bowie's life when he made a suggestion to Bowie's manager that there were already too many Joneses in the entertainment world. The Bromley-raised David Jones saw the adoption of a new stage name as an opportunity to redefine his faltering career and changed his name to David Bowie, after the American Colonel James Bowie, Davy Crockett's sidekick in The Alamo. Pitt and Bowie soon paired up, and it became apparent the Bowie desired to become the "renaissance man of pop". Bowie's aspirations were to sing and dance; he wanted to be seen as an artiste rather than someone who had only just recently shed his rough and ready R&B skin."

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