But Ziggy's still releasing more albums than Axl Rose, that counts for something.

I did it.  I managed to put together three more books based on the stuff I had available that *might* be worth publishing and have ordered proof copies.  Even if everything goes well, it will take a long time to get through them and I'm in no rush.  Even if I worked full-time on editing them - and I won't - it's pretty clear that I'll have another book's worth of material written by the time I finally got through them.

But the goal was to have more material ready before the collapse happens.  I've got my eighteen finished books so-far and now there's three more in the pipeline and this isn't even including all the work I had.  It does wipe out all the stuff I had typed and saved but there's still all the things I've written which exist on the internet, or on printed pages that aren't on a computer or in hand-written notebooks.  When am I ever going to find time to go through that?

It's fun though, working this all out.  It's good to have a hobby.

As I was working today, the word "Ziggy" passed through my mind, so naturally I listened to Ziggy Stardust.  I'm sure that's pretty common.  It's been ages since I'd heard it, so why not?

I started off with the bonus tracks on whatever edition I purchased ages ago.  By now I'm wondering how much of pop-culture was all part of leftist conspiracy and Bowie would have been at the forefront of that.  "John, I'm Only Dancing" pointed the way for marriage to burn down because the pussy wants pussy too.  If I recall, he only married Angie to keep her from being kicked out of Britain so it's not like they were close.  She wasn't exactly sane either, working hard to play The Scarlet Witch in a Marvel movie before those were a thing  Wikipedia says it was the Black Widow, I can't find my Bowie biography where I learned about this to look it up.

Anyway, that song was followed by "Velvet Goldmine" which is about sex without gender and became the title of a movie about the rockscene conspiracy staring actors who are now known as Obi-Wan and Batman.  Of course I have no interest in seeing the movie but apparently it's based on Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, which seems to be where this move came from.

The music itself is fine.  I've never had a high opinion of Bowie's style but the songs worked well, catchy, well-produced, going in sensible directions.  "Velvet Goldmine" was the only stand-out for sounding like different musical pieces just fitted together and was only released a few years later as a b-side for other Bowie songs being re-released, "Changes" and "Space Oddity."  I have to wonder if b-sides are used for subversive reasons, trying to be played in underground organizations.

I also have to wonder how much of this was trying to get all the different groups together.  Bowie intended a number of the songs to be given to Mott the Hoople and there must have been thought of the Spiders From Mars continuing on as a band.  They were all sharing sex and drugs, one assumes politics too.

There's really no plot, Bowie is just an omnisexual alien playing rock-music and becoming megafamous.  The songs were picked for concert reasons against the two+ albums of material Bowie had written and the failure of his previous album, Hunky Dory.  Otherwise, it's pushing the narrative.  Ziggy is a "Lady Stardust" too so the boys want him.  "Five Years" was a set-up and not intrinsically different from Al Gore's promise to destroy the world.  "Rock'n'Roll Suicide" is a nice ending and I'm not complaining about the songs in-and-of themselves but that's basically it for the story.

It wasn't a hit.  It made #5 in Britain which brings in a nice living but isn't going to make you rich.  To do that, you need a hit in the US and it only reached #75 there.  But it must have been popular to some underground organizations, I assume Bowie didn't need to buy a drink when he went to certain bars and such.  Performing here would help build an audience.  His next two albums reached around the Top 20 and Diamond Dogs made #5.  Seriously?  It didn't have any hit singles, "Rebel Rebel" is one of Bowie's best known songs and it didn't make Top 70 on Billboard.

I am starting to wonder how much of music sales charts are made-up.  Officially that was common until the 1990s when scanners were used to determine every sale but I do wonder if it still keeps going and with something like this, I have to wonder how far it went.  "Got your mother in a whirl/she's not sure if you're a boy or a girl" is what some people were into then and now.  Young Americans made top 10, presumably helped by the newly-repopular John Lennon, and by that point, Bowie was probably a real star.

Even there, the media seems to be what really helped.  He made Station to Station (which is one of my favorites) and then the Berlin trilogy.  Changing styles does help and he was certainly good at that.  Then he specifically worked for a huge hit with Let's Dance and got one.  Then it was back to his level of normal.  I liked several songs and a large part of the first Tin Machine album but that basically where my interest in his work ended.

Obviously we no-longer know what it was like in a pre-internet world, how wanna-be stars got around and tried to find an audience.  It's a safe bet that there were a lot of them who pretended to be aliens but they were just crazy people who believed themselves to be superior to humanity.  And they invaded the world.  "Became the special man, then we were Ziggy's band."

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