Donahue, Mark Philadelphia Tribune, The 04-04-2003 (EMI, 2 CD-set, $26.98) David Bowie Ziggy Stardust, the orange-haired alter ego of David Bowie, departed on July 3, 1973, when he played his last show with The Spiders From Mars at London's Hammersmith Odeon....

"I could make a transformation as a rock and roll star / So inviting, so enticing to play the part / I could play the wild mutation as a rock and roll star . . ." -- from "Star," on "The Rise and...

The enigma that is David Bowie first came to the attention of most of the American public in 1972, with the release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. Admittedly, the album was a remarkable achievement, a careful package that tread somewhere between concept album and rock opera, but would it have been as noticed had Bowie not held his widely publicized interview in which he stated he was gay, just prior to Ziggy Stardust's release? Despite Bowie's frequently reit...

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars depicted an impending doomsday, an extraterrestrial visitation and its consequences for rock and society. Although never so billed, Ziggy was a rock opera, with plot, characters and musical and dramatic momentum. Aladdin Sane, in far less systematic fashion, works over the same themes—issuances from the Bowie schema which date back to The Man Who Sold the World. Bowie is cognizant that religion's geography—the heavens—...

[The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is] David Bowie's most thematically ambitious, musically coherent album to date, the record in which he unites the major strengths of his previous work and comfortably reconciles himself to some apparently inevitable problems…. Side two is the soul of the album, a kind of psychological equivalent of [The Kinks's] Lola vs. Powerman that delves deep into a matter close to David's heart: What's it all about to be ...