Episode 1: Bowie, Ziggy Stardust, and Simple Content Storytelling
I was preparing another episode of this podcast to release as episode #1. You'll hear that one next week. But then something happened. I saw the new film, Moonage Daydream, documenting the art of David Bowie from his early career to his final work, Blackstar, released days after his passing in 2016.
David Bowie has been, for the past 17 or 18 years or so, my favorite musical artist. I saw him twice on his Reality Tour in 2004, which ended up being his last significant tour in the United States.
1972's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars is one of the most influential rock albums of all time. Ziggy is a concept album that loosely follows a rock star from outer space who comes to save the earth five years ahead of an impending disaster. Over that time, he becomes beloved - rising to epic stardom. Ziggy buys into all the hype and self-destructs, eventually dying on stage.
It's my favorite Bowie album. I think a few of his albums are objectively better, but Ziggy is my favorite. When I get a new piece of audio equipment, it's become a tradition that the first thing I play is the opening track, Five Years. I love it.
Using Simple Concepts for Compelling Stories
I heard a quote in Moonage Daydream that I had heard before, but in the context of the film, it resonated with me and caused me to change my plan for the first episode. Here's Bowie in his own words from a 1977 interview for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:
"I wanted to define the archetype. Messiah rockstar. That's all I wanted to do. And I used the trappings of Kabuki theater, mime technique, and fringe New York music - like my references were Velvet Underground. So Ziggy was, for me, a very simplistic thing. It was what it seemed to be: an alien rockstar.”
“And for performance value, I dressed him and acted him out. I left it at that, but other people re-read him and contributed more information about Ziggy than I had put into him."
The concept album is told in a story form with a point of view that shifts throughout the album. Here's Bowie:
"I put three viewpoints into [the album] from three different areas...the character himself ...and then there would be two other statements by two other people...It was the way an author would write a book...it hadn't been utilized that much in records.”
“It was a theater piece that The Spiders didn't really exist. They only existed for the length of duration of that character's life...took a long time to shake him off after I'd finished working with him because people relate to Ziggy more than David Bowie at the time. It was still very hard for anybody to realize that a rock artist can go on stage and be a different person every time he goes on stage. You don't have to be the same personality every time you go on stage, and mine was more exaggerated."
Despite all that, the magic in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars is in its simplicity. Bowie designed the character to be a familiar archetype - a messianic character - a hero. It's a typical rock star story arc, except the main character's an alien. Bowie used a few influences to bring that together, including the New York City band The Velvet Underground and Kabuki Theatre.
That was it, though. It was a simple concept. Everything else that Ziggy Stardust was to fans around the world came from what they brought to the character.
I find that fascinating. I once read a book about writing effective business proposals. In that book, one thing, in particular, remained with me: Keep things simple.
Whether you're writing a business proposal, creating a blog post or video, or making a loosely-assembled rock opera about an attractive androgynous alien who's really good at guitar, some of the concepts of good storytelling are the same.
Simplicity is one of them.
Simplicity allows you to create a narrative that will not only get your point across in a way that people can understand. It also helps people fill in the gaps and make their own leaps based on personal experiences.
Leave Room For Your Audience To Interpret Your Content
You often hear songwriters much less talented than David Bowie hesitate to talk about the meaning behind the songs they write. They release their songs into the world - perhaps with a particular meaning behind them. But once that song is in the hands of the people, they'll bring their own meaning to it. Ziggy Stardust is one of the best examples of that.
Story is so important. What is it that you want to get across to your audience? How do you want it to resonate? Often, we may want our content to achieve a number of goals:
Educate
Inform
Advocate
Motivate
Entertain
Simple concepts help the content creator to achieve those goals.
In Harvard Business Publishing's white paper Telling Stories: How Leaders Can Influence, Teach, and Inspire, the authors Vanessa Boris and Lani Peterson tell us that:
"Storytelling works because it parallels the ways in which we receive, analyze, organize, and archive any information that comes into our brains. Facts enter as data points; stories connect the dots. When we hear a new story, we value it and attach emotions to it. We integrate it with our own inner "treasure trove" of previously heard or directly experienced moments, adjusting, updating, and replacing old stories that are no longer relevant or accurate.”
“Through new and updated stories, we absorb incoming facts, make connections, and interpret meaning. And changes to neural pathways actually happen. As a result, we're able to work from a larger story, one that offers greater perspective, enabling more options and more opportunities to try on new ideas or behaviors without external risk. And in that moment, sustainable learning occurs."
Good storytelling lets your audience have just enough information to craft their own story. In Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie got to that place through simplicity.
How do you get to simplicity? How do you ensure the theme of the content you create is simple? Compelling? Resonant? Original?
Let's look at originality because it doesn't necessarily mean what you might think. As Bowie said, he used a fairly common archetype when creating Ziggy. He took in other influences: New York City art rock like the Velvet Underground. He used mime concepts. He incorporated kabuki theater makeup - all things that had inspired him in certain ways.
The simple act of taking some seemingly unrelated things and putting them together to make something new within that overall simple concept can create a genuinely original and innovative idea.
Think of some ways you might want to take these storytelling lessons from Ziggy Stardust when building your own content. What are they? Let me know. I'd love to hear them.
There's a lot more to David Bowie that we've only scratched the surface on, such as concepts like authenticity, experience, and point of view. Bowie regularly changed his persona and point of view to tell different stories through his art at various places in his life. We'll save those for later.
Have you listened to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars before? If not, I encourage you to check it out. I've linked to the album on Apple Music and Spotify: