10 Perfect Glam Rock Albums With No Bad Songs

You can pretty much chalk any glam rock subgenre up to the house that Bowie built. Before it was even cool to do it, Bowie was already reinventing the visual medium for rock stars, whether that meant dressing up in dresses on stage or claiming to be an alien from the other side of the galaxy. While the arrival of Ziggy Stardust may have been our first contact with glam rock, Aladdin Sane is what happens when that character is brought back down to Earth again.

Standing out as a much harder affair than Ziggy, Aladdin Sane is where Bowie's artsy streak gets a lot more aggro, with songs like Watch That Man playing up the pure debauchery that was going on at the time. Along with the reinterpretations of his old songs like the Prettiest Star, this is very much in the realm of Ziggy Goes to America, with songs like Drive In Saturday and the Jean Genie putting the balladeer and rock and roll Bowie in the same room together.

There are even some parts of this album that almost stand in a genre unto themselves, like the title track with its strange atonal piano solo or the sounds of the closer Lady Grinning Soul which seems destined for some James Bond style movie. At a time when most of glam rock was coming into full view, it took the seasoned veteran to show us all how it was done one more time.