Bowie asks the crowd: Who’ll love Aladdin Sane? He already knows the answer
At what point did Bowie stop being Ziggy and start being Aladdin? Are we still in Ziggy’s world, or are we back with ‘David’ now? Listening to the fractured, tormented Aladdin Sane provides no real answers. In fact, the distinction of truth and crafted character is more blurred than ever before. Whereas on the preceding record, ‘Ziggy’ was very much a protagonist that had a (albeit chronologically messy) narrative, here ‘Aladdin Sane’ doesn’t seem to refer to any one character, with the album populated by a series of paranoid, skittish and occasionally doom-fearing narrators, presumably some of these perspectives are shared with Bowie himself.
Out in the real world, Bowie was finding the pressures of his growing fame taxing. The increasingly elaborate on-and-off stage character that he was playing to his audience added to these demands, while the increasing availability and wide use of drugs were starting to have some serious effects on the increasingly gaunt young artist. Perhaps giving some insight into the genesis of the album’s title, a lad, insane.