Before his move to Berlin, Bowie took on numerous different personas, each representing an issue he had been dealing with during the time. The most notable of his pre-Berlin characters were Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and The Thin White Duke.
Ziggy Stardust
In the early seventies Bowie adapted his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, a promiscuous rock star with the intentions of presenting humanity’s ideas of peace and understanding to extraterrestrials. His concept album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, is “just a few little scenes from the life of a band called Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, who could feasibly be the last band on Earth” (Schneider).
Ziggy Stardust. Photo licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Aladdin Sane
After Ziggy Stardust, Bowie reinvented himself as Aladdin Sane, a pun on “a lad insane”. This new persona expressed his rising fame and internal conflict, showed by the famous lightening strike across his face. “Bowie came to rock from a tradition of cabaret and musical theater, rather than following the most conventional pattern of a rocker picking up sophistication as he goes along” (Sukita).
The Thin White Duke
This new persona of Bowie reflected his emerging struggle with drugs in the mid-seventies. Labeling the Duke as a “nasty character indeed” (Hawking), this persona came about during Bowie’s years in L.A. Being addicted to cocaine during the production of Station to Station, Bowie often stated that he did not remember ever making the album, and that the years of being the Thin White Duke were some of the darkest days of his life.
“Bowie as The Thin White Duke” by Jean-Luc Ourlin is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.