David Bowie’s 1972 Santa Monica Concert to be Released, Ziggy as Persona
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
David Bowie in persona as Ziggy
David Bowie is, or more correctly, has been one of our more chameleon-like musical performers since the late 60’s. By 1972 when Bowie had adopted a new persona, Ziggy Stardust, his performances were memorable not only for introducing a new genre, Glam Rock, but for his wildly coloured orange hair, his sci-fi inspired modern outfits and his androgynous stance. As the music critic Robert Hilburn says of Bowie in retrospect, it was hard to tell “whether Bowie wanted to be the new Elvis Presley or Judy Garland.”
Bowie’s use of personas to present his music as well as his world-view continued through the albums Aladdin Sane [A lad insane] and Diamond Dogs, and reached its apotheosis with his Thin White Duke persona for the album Station to Station, which many people criticized as too close to a portrayal of a Nazi for comfort. Bowie and his supporters blamed his cocaine addiction at the time. He recovered from the bad press to deliver a trilogy of his greatest work Low, Heroes and Lodger, known as the Berlin Trilogy, all produced by Brian Eno.
All of this brings up an interesting question – Which version of Bowie do/did you relate to the most?
Bowie’s Ziggy persona catapulted him to fame in the USA, but who was more famous? Bowie or Ziggy? If we take the dictionary definition of persona it defines persona as so: the mask or façade presented to satisfy the demands of the situation or the environment. And identity as so: the state or fact of being the same one as described.
That’s not helpful. Bowie could be identified as Bowie as he steps from the stage still in his Ziggy costume if we look beyond his Ziggy persona. For example a fan might exclaim – “that’s David Bowie dressed as Ziggy Stardust.” More likely though a fan would exclaim – “There’s Ziggy Stardust.” Persona and identity become inseparable.
And of course all these thoughts bring me to Social Media which was not an online phenomena in 1972. With regard to personas vs identity on Facebook for instance, I read this post on idunno.org – “The ease by which fake profiles can be created on social networking sites clearly defines the separation between the two concepts. From a technical point of view a users identity is tied to authentication and authorisation (claims in SAML talk); your identity on facebook is your login information nothing more, and we’re gradually becoming well trained not to give that away. What other people recognise “you” by is your persona; the public facing information you provide; and there is no way to check the veracity of that persona, except by validating those incidents or attributes known by shared experience.”
In other words we can argue that we know Bowie was “acting out” his persona mainly in performance because we can “validate those incidents” as mentioned above. On Facebook we may never be able to “validate those incidents” amongst our hundreds of “friends.” I’ve argued before that especially for marketers, they don’t exist.
Meanwhile Bowie was very successful at it, as Robert Hilburn points out referring to the soon to be released 1972 Santa Monica concert – “For the encore, he turned to “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide,” a delicate, anthem-ish number from “Ziggy.” Reaching out to the audience, Bowie offered these soothing words: “You’re not alone . . . gimme your hands.” Thousands in the auditorium reached out to him.”
What does Hilburn mean by him?
