On the album opener "Five Years," he broods most operatically and convincingly. While "pushing through the market square," the narrator (Bowie, probably - Ziggy doesn't really make an entrance until "Moonage Daydream") discovers that the world is ending. "News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in / News guy wept and told us, earth was really dying / Cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying." The scenario is familiar to any fan of 60's science fiction, or any survivor of the cold war, but Bowie fleshes out the story even more, personalizing it.

I heard telephones, opera house, favourite melodies
I saw boys, toys, electric irons and TV's
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there
And all the fat-skinny people, and all the tall-short people
And all the nobody people, and all the somebody people
I never thought I'd need so many people.

Despite the odd assertion that warehouses hurt like anything, least of all brains, the lyric hits its poetic and emotional mark dead-on. This is our world, full of people and culture and junk, and what would we do without it? Some of us would go mad. "A girl my age went off her head, hit some tiny children / If the black hadn't pulled her off, I think she would have killed them."

Others, like the narrator, go somewhere else. "And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor." Even in the midst of certain apocalypse, there is time to be cool. From the faded-in opening drumbeat to the small symphony of strings and synths that mark the song's climax, it is honest, and real, and affecting. And artificial, of course - remember kids, it's all fiction.

In the song "Star," he states his artifice most plainly. "I could make the transformation as a rock and roll star / I could play the wild mutation as a rock n roll star," he openly dreams. But the album flows so well, and is so musically cohesive, that the artifice becomes brilliantly mixed with the raw emotion, and it quickly becomes impossible to separate one from the other.

Much has been said about Ziggy Stardust's status as a "concept album." In truth, it is and it isn't. If by concept album you mean something with a story, like Pink Floyd's The Wall, forget it. There are just enough tantalizing vignettes to suggest a story, but far too few to make any sort of logical sense. No, the concept of Ziggy Stardust is merely Ziggy Stardust himself, and what Bowie thinks he represents. This is a wide-open field of meanings and stories and oddities, tied together by consistency in mood and pace and depth, but not by any story, or even any consistent voice or character. Ziggy doesn't narrate the album; he plays some songs on it. (Onstage, the character became far more real, but let's stick to the record here.)