“Ziggy Stardust”

“‘Ziggy Stardust’ represented a side path, an evolutionary branch nature chose not to continue, a revelation of the coolness of androgyny, a space metaphor based on a queer inverted geometry which took its new audience by surprise, but, in the process, thrilled it, amazed it, and made it want to dance. Nothing existed to which the work could be compared. Like all true innovations in the arts, it seemed to have materialized ex nihilo, as if its strange molecules had been brushed off onto the earthly plane by the passage through it of some invisible dimension. Bowie’s music affected its audience neither by inciting profound or inspirational thoughts nor by rousing latent feelings of love, sadness, or hope; instead, it acted like an epinephrine-syringe plunged forcefully into the heart of one’s sex-identity. Psychological theorists might ventilate till their ribbons ran out of ink, in lengthy chapters of Latin-larded prose on the need for men to make contact with their hidden feminine fraction, without yielding a single sum. But let the unfleshed musical bones of the apocalyptic “Five Years” begin to rattle out of stereo speakers and the fragments of a young man’s psychic gender began immediately to unite.”