After their last show together as Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in July ’73, David Bowie (Ziggy) entrusts Spiders’ lead guitarist Mick Ronson with his guitar in a world inverted from ours through more than just colors. It has been proven that *our* Bowie knew of such worlds in music videos like “Loving the Alien” from his much maligned “Tonight” album released in the mid-80s, a time when mainstream rock music in general was going through a rough patch of banality. An inverted universe is front and center when we enter the video with a blue (opposite of skin color) Bowie praying with clinched teeth to an unlistening and perhaps unreal deity.
Then it becomes starkly obvious when Bowie sits in front of a mirror and is forced to watch it flip into this “negative” self by a restraining nun figure.
With the lyrics’ emphasis on Christianity against Islam, and organized religion vs. heathenism and nonbelievers as a whole, Bowie warns that we often get history backwards through the lens of Western Civilization, justifying mass killings in crusades ancient and new in the name of a supposed one true God — *our* God. Turn to the aliens for a higher and more correct perspective on the situation, he seems to say. Love the aliens… in ourselves.
Back to Bowie and Ronson and the handing over of the guitar, this didn’t happen in our world. The Mars Guitar was destroyed that summer night in London along with the backing Spiders band, never to be played with again. But through Jonny Silverhhand and Cyberpunk 2077, a role David Bowie was slated to play until his untimely death in 2016, alternate paths can be explored. No regrets, Bowie confronts his own reflection after the Black Star incident. The guitar plays on.
Sunklands 