Bowie succeeds not in spite of his pretensions but because of them, and Ziggy Stardust -- familiar in structure, but alien in performance -- is the first time his vision and execution met in such a grand, sweeping fashion.
In giving in to his own imagination and creating his own world, Bowie changed ours immeasurably, and for that many a pop fan should be eternally grateful.
The record that made Bowie the star he'd been acting like for a while, although its reputation isn't quite the same as its reality.
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars took the world by storm in 1972, and it’s still a masterpiece forty years later.