Hear Me Out: David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust is based on Jesus Christ
In some ways, rock stars are hard to discern from messiahs. None more so than Ziggy Stardust, not least because he’s divorced from reality. There are those of a certain generation who recall the moment that David Bowie took his new mercurial creation to Top of the Pops, and as ‘Starman’ played, he simply pointed down the lens of the camera, and it was as though he had miraculously unzipped your TV screen. His fateful finger waggled and welcomed you to climb inside his bohemian universe—a new liberated republic. The world would never be the same again.
A harbinger of sorts, Bowie, from the get-go, set about shifting the compass of our virtues. With androgyny, radicalism, and a shock of lightning, he looked to persuade the youth of the day to follow a more liberated path. However, it was his creation who embodied this for him. An otherworldly rock star, not quite a mere mortal like the performer behind it all, he had invented a hero. But please note, by no means am I equating Ziggy to a deity or sullying Jesus Christ as a rocker, I am simply saying that Bowie – whether intentionally or otherwise – seemingly took cues from Christianity when crafting the narrative and persona of his alter ego, as these parallels will hopefully show.
In the period before Jesus Christ was immaculately conceived, greed, tyranny and general bastardry, was delving the world deeper into misery and sin. As the newscast proclaims on ‘Five Years’, the world before Ziggy was much the same. A debauched assault on Earthly resources had left the world on the brink of an apocalypse, and we only had five years to save it unless a saviour could reap some sort of salvational repentance.
However, this salvation would not come from a singular miracle as though God extended his finger and removed the wicked engines of evil seated at the wheel of power, but rather from the ground-up, from the lowly disenfranchised masses themselves. Whispers of a star above of barn in Bethlehem might have caught the attention of wise men and shepherds in Christ’s life; it was rumours of hopeful salvation echoing in the youth’s underground circles in Ziggy’s.
Christ’s message was to reconnect the world with God on high, not to literally bring God to us, as though offering instant deliverance, but to spread the message of his creator so that we may rise beyond sin. Hope is on high in Ziggy’s world, too, in a very literal and metaphorical sense. Some far out alien messiahs float above us. The world can be saved if only we can exult ourselves toward these overlords. If only someone among us has the daring grasp to clutch the Excalibur of existential redemption and call upon these space oddities to redeem us from our blind greed. Step forward, Ziggy Stardust, like some cat from Japan, he could lick them by smiling.
Christ’s preachings began young, and he was, indeed, rock ‘n’ roll in his disposition. Vying against the current currency of power, he sought to speak the truth at a cost. Likewise, Ziggy sets about grabbing the lapels of the youth and rattling them into action like a second-hand Skoda travelling over a cattle grid. Unlike Christ, Ziggy sustained himself on a diet of sex and drugs, cocaine and coitus, as opposed to regimented celibacy, bread and wine, but they both assumed the role of a divine messenger, nevertheless.
Alas, they both knew that they could not forego help on their mission. Christ gathered his disciples, and Ziggy assembled his trusted coterie of cool cats, christening them the Spiders from Mars. Therein this half-aliens sure-fire message was: we are here to fart around, not one fart more and not one fart less. Or, as this is often put in the language of rock ‘n’ roll and religion: we’re here for peace and love, dude. The inevitable result is that Stardust and the Spiders from Mars enrapture the youth and begin their ascension to stardom. This is their rise, but as the title of the sacred album documenting his tale foretells, a fall must follow. Like Christ and the apostles, they had to reach the point of incendiary celebrity status to disseminate their good, counterculture measure, and sustain that through the gracious Godsend of transcendent tragedy.
But before that, Ziggy takes a wayward turn. His moment of ‘Christ in the Temple’ that shows us everyone is fallible arrives when his rocking gets the better of him, and the sight of his true mission is lost. Alas, this slide is fleeting, and faith is soon restored. And so when the arc of his testament is complete, with his message imparted of returning to the 1960s’ goodwill, the Gods residing above us have saved us from the impending five-year apocalypse. “You’re wonderful, Ziggy,” the descended starmen say to our hero under the guiding spotlight, “Gimme your hands”. There must be a sacrifice for salvation, a rock ‘n’ roll suicide.
A year after unzipping our TV screens on Top of the Pops, Ziggy Stardust lay dead on the floor of the Hammersmith Odeon. Bowie stood over the height of his success and announced: “Of all the shows on this tour, this particular show will remain with us the longest… Because not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do. Thank you.”
Ziggy had ascended, sacrificed at the altar of his own greatness, with a sigh from the audience tempered by a dose of inspiration and the unspoken message that it is now up to the disciples to keep him alive. This was calvary, Bowie had knowingly marched his creation towards the cross of the Odeon’s stage at the peak of his powers. It wasn’t particularly a new creative idea or continuation of the story that had prompted this – (he might have claimed Ziggy’s days were creatively spent, but were any of the subsequent creations all that different?) – but rather the knowledge that this end would ensure Ziggy’s immortality and the tenets of his virtues would live on.
In culture, he is now arguably more of an icon than Bowie himself; at art fares and markets, you will see the image of Ziggy and his otherworldly iconography plastered all over in worshipping works. He has become to Bowie what the crucifix is to Christianity, a symbol of a way of life and a way to honour something dearly beloved.
And to crown things off, when Bowie saw Vince Taylor – the rocker who provided the first impetus for Ziggy – he declared: “He came out on stage in white robes and said he was Jesus Christ. It was the end of Vince – his career and everything else.” But it certainly wowed ‘The Starman’ enough to mimic its bombast with the veil of a heavenly character.
