David Bowie "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" [1972]

"Garishly pretentious" doesn't even begin to really describe this -- a concept album about a rock star who looks good and dresses real freaky; gee, to whom could he be referring? Clearly desperation was setting in for Bowie, who'd already struck out numerous times trying to climb to the top of the heap of late 60s/early 70s airwaves, with scant success (to put it mildly). By now deep in hock to his record label, Bowie went for broke completely and wound up as the circus freak nightmare we all know today as Ziggy Stardust. Ruder and noisier than previous releases, he's still at heart an egregious purveyor of "cabaret rock," which really should have gotten him flushed into total obscurity and forgotten about. But no -- not in the 70s: self-conscious pomp and wank was just coming into fashion, and this album is largely to blame for this (only his remedial-level musicianship kept him from attempting a 20-minute magnum opus). Bowie shows tremendously audacious cheek for someone beginning a cocaine-induced metamorphosis into a gigantic insect: cashing in on some Elton John-style piano hackery one minute, ripping off art-fops Roxy Music the next. Ultimately, Bowie has always been an incorrigible attention-seeker; we ought to have just ignored him and sooner or later he'd have gone away.