The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars depicted an impending doomsday, an extraterrestrial visitation and its consequences for rock and society. Although never so billed, Ziggy was a rock opera, with plot, characters and musical and dramatic momentum. Aladdin Sane, in far less systematic fashion, works over the same themes—issuances from the Bowie schema which date back to The Man Who Sold the World. Bowie is cognizant that religion's geography—the heavens—has been usurped, either by science or by actual beings.

If by conventional lights Bowie is a lad insane, then as an Aladdin, a conjurer of supernatural forces, he is quite sane. The titles may change from album to album—from the superman, the homo superior, Ziggy, to Aladdin—but the vision, and Bowie's rightful place in it, remain constant….

The title song is this album's "Five Years." Ominously, within parentheses after the title, are the dates "1913-1938-197?" The first two are the years before the outbreak of the first and second World Wars, respectively, and we have no reason to think that 197?" represents anything but a year prior to the date of the third….

Only a couple of words of the lyrics indicate over what point the song title's question mark must be hovering. The reference to sake, the Japanese drink, in the first verse, and the last verse's "Millions weep a fountain/just in case of sunrise" suggest the land of the rising sun as a potentially significant future locale. While writing this album, Bowie decided to tour Japan and Ziggy was described on the last album as "like some cat from Japan." The relationship of Aladdin's visitations to the outbreak of war is not clear. Is it his appearance, or our failure to embrace him, which plunges us in to strife?

Although a good portion of the songs on Aladdin Sane are hard rock & roll, a closer inspection reveals them to be advertisements for their own obsolescence—vignettes in which the baton is being passed on to a newer sensibility. "Watch That Man," the album's opening number is inimitable Stones, Exile vintage … Like Ziggy, one of the subjects of Aladdin Sane is rock & roll (and its lynchpin, sex), only here it is extended to include its ultimate exponents, the Stones….

Rock and revolutionary stardom are not the only varieties which are doomed. In his work Bowie is often contemptuous of actors, yet he is, above all, an actor. His intent on "Cracked Actor," a portrait of an aging screen idol, vicious, conceited, mercenary, the object of the ministrations of a male gigolo, is to strip the subject of his validity, as he has done with the rocker, as a step towards a re-definition of these roles and his own inhabiting of them. The homosexuality of "Cracked Actor" is not, as elsewhere, groundbreaking and affirmative, but rather decadent and sick. "The Prettiest Star," the album's other slice of cinematic life, again asserts the connection between secular and celestial stardom: "You and I will rise up all the way / All because of what you are / The Prettiest Star." But the song itself is too self-consciously vaudeville.

"Time" is a bit of Brecht / Weill, a bit of Brel. All the world's not a stage, but a dressing room, in which Time holds sway, exacts payment. Once we're on, as in all theaters, time is suspended….

[The] outlines are sufficiently legible to establish the records from The Man Who Sold the World to Aladdin as reworkings of the same obsessions—only the word obsession smacks too much of psychological enslavement. Partly, the difficulty derives from the very private language Bowie employs; partly, I suspect, it is the function of a very canny withholding of information. Each album seems to advance the myth, but perhaps it is only a matter of finding new metaphors for the same message….

Aladdin is less manic than The Man Who Sold the World, and less intimate than Hunky Dory, with none of its attacks of self-doubt. Ziggy, in turn, was less autobiographically revealing, more threatening than its predecessors, but still compact. Like David's Radio City Music Hall show, Aladdin is grander, more produced: David is more than ever more mastermind than participant. Aladdin's very eclecticism makes it even less exposed, conceptually, than Ziggy. Three of the tracks, "Pretty As A Star," "Let's Spend the Night Together," and the related "The Jean Genie," are inferior; they lack the obdurate strength of the remaining songs, not to mention the perfection of Hunky Dory and Ziggy. The calmness of the former, the inexorability of the latter (which manages to subsume the question of each individual song's merit) are not Aladdin Sane's….

As a strictly musical figure Bowie is of major importance. His remoteness, his stubborness, do not describe a man at the mercy of the media or his audience, ready to alter his course at their behest, but one who wills them to do his bidding—the arrogance of the true believer. David has organized his career according to a schedule to which he steadfastly adheres. With Time waiting in the wings, an apocalypse near at hand, he lacks the freedom to tamper with it.

Certainly there is a general sense of oncoming catastrophe afoot in the land; many of his other concerns enjoy equal currency. But Bowie, unique among the pop musicians of today, sees them as the province of popular music (and popular music, by extension, as a world-shaking force). He is attempting to seize hold of these questions with the energy and commitment the Beatles and Dylan evinced towards their areas of concern in the Sixties. With the benefit of hindsight, he seeks the kind of power the Beatles and Dylan had to discover they could have. However, it is not his goal just to return music to its stature as more than music. With the benefit of hindsight, it is to take it one step further.