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There was a lot of hoopla about Lady Gaga appearing at the MTV Video Music Awards as her alter ego Jo Calderone last weekend. But Mother Monster is hardly the first entertainer to use another personality for performing. Here are a few others.
David Bowie/The Thin White Duke/Ziggy Stardust
David Bowie may have one of the most famous alter egos ever – Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy made his debut on February 10, 1972, at a little bar called Toby Jug in London. Bowie decided the alien messiah was tasked with saving our doomed planet but would ultimately get sucked in to our human ways, destroying himself in the process.
Unfortunately, Bowie got so deep into character that he almost ended up destroying himself. “I fell for Ziggy too,” he said in 1976. “It was quite easy to become obsessed night and day with the character. I became Ziggy Stardust. David Bowie went totally out the window. Everybody was convincing me that I was a Messiah, especially on that first American tour. I got hopelessly lost in the fantasy.”
He pulled his character’s personas from two main inspirations: the guy who replaced Lou Reed in the Velvet Underground, and a British rocker named Vince Taylor. VU singer Doug Yule once had Bowie absolutely convinced that he was Lou Reed. Yule looked very much like his predecessor and engaged in a conversation where he talked about songs he had created that, in fact, Reed had actually written.
Taylor was a star who fronted a band called Vince Taylor and the Playboys to enormous success. He started doing various drugs, including lots of LSD, and by the mid-‘60s he was telling people that he was Jesus or the prophet Matthew, apparently existing on a diet of nothing but eggs. “He was out of his gourd,” Bowie said. “I remember him opening a map outside Charing Cross tube station, putting it on the pavement and kneeling down with a magnifying glass. He pointed out all the sites where UFOs were going to land.”
Once Ziggy’s time on Earth had passed, Bowie adopted a new persona named the Thin White Duke. The Duke was a cold, impeccably dressed man who has been described as zombie-like, Aryan and a mad aristocrat. In short, he was definitely a character you probably didn’t want to find yourself alone with. Bowie later admitted he found the Duke “a nasty character.”
These days, however, he’s just David Bowie.
Photo by Mick Rock.
Nicki Minaj/Roman Zolanski/Nicki Teresa/Rosa
Singer Nicki Minaj has a lot of personalities taking up her inner real estate, which she has said is a result of her parents constantly fighting when she was a kid. To escape, she created characters and worlds in her mind and went into them.
Her first album Pink Friday , released last year, was really only partially performed by Nicki. The other part was performed by Roman Zolanski, the “boy who lives inside [her],” though she has also referred to Roman as her twin sister. Whatever gender Roman is, he/she apparently comes out specifically when she raps – Roman dueted with Eminem on the song “Roman’s Revenge” and with Trey Songz on the song “Bottoms Up.”
Late last year, Nicki debuted a new alter ego – Nicki Teresa, a healer who spreads peace and love to her fans. She also showed off Rosa on Lopez Tonight in December:
Andy Kaufman/Tony Clifton
more …
Illustrator Andrew Kolb was listening to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” when he realized the imagery would make a great children’s book. Well, you know – if your kids are ready to deal with the tragedy of an astronaut dying alone in space. The book isn’t available in hard copy (yet), but you can get the PDF for free.
Link via Laughing Squid
The British Royal Mail service commissioned Studio Dempsey to create first class stamps with classic albums covers. The covers include albums from Blur, New Order, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Primal Scream, David Bowie, The Clash, Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd, and Coldplay -but no Beatles.
The final selection of ten sleeves (which perhaps oddly doesn’t feature one of The Beatles’ album covers) will appear on a set of 10 stamps that will launch on January 7, 2010 – and the stamps will be uniquely shaped, as shown in these images, to accommodate a glimpse of a vinyl disc poking out of each record sleeve.
Link – via babycreativeblog
From the Upcoming 
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German arachnologist Peter Jaeger has discovered 200 species of spiders in the past decade. Now he has named one of his finds after singer David Bowie. The new species, a large yellow spider in Malaysia, is called Heteropoda davidbowie. Jaeger said he named the spider to draw attention to the discovery, and to the endangered status of many spiders.
“It is working against time,” he said. “We are also quickly losing genetic resources that have evolved over more than 300 million years.”
Bowie had a 1972 album entitled The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. His 1987 tour was named the Glass Spider Tour. Link -via Digg
(image credit: Senckenberg Forschungsinstitute/Naturmuseen)
David Bowie is a great musician with a wide variety of musical talent. He’s also got a heck of an interesting life story, far more than I could actually include in this post, including his having a hot super model wife.
David Bowie at the O’Keefe Center in Toronto, Canada (1976) Photo: jlacpo [Flickr]
“Bowie” is Loaded with Alter Egos
Although he was born David Robert Hayward-Jones in 1947, he had already decided to change his name to “Davie Jones” by the sixties. Unfortunately, this caused confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkeys, so he changed it to “David Bowie” in 1966. The name came from the hero of the Alamo, Jim Bowie.
By 1972, he already became someone else, taking on the androgynous personality of Ziggy Stardust. This character helped Bowie get a foothold into stardom with the revolutionary themed album, Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars.
After Ziggy’s retirement, a new persona took over, known as “The Thin White Duke.” This character was based on the character Bowie played in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Unfortunately, The Thin White Duke was a rather negative character and when mixed with excessive cocaine use, he caused quite a bit of a stir by saying and doing things to support fascism and Nazism. Since the Thin White Duke’s retirement, Bowie has had to work rather hard to distance himself from the statements of the time, and even donated $10,000 to the NAACP.
He’s Big on Collaborations
David Bowie has worked with some of the most cutting edge artists in the music industry, as well as some of the most highly-regarded musicians in modern history. One of his closest friends since the beginning was Iggy Pop, who Bowie helped get through some of the tougher times by recording the songs they co-wrote together once he was a household name. The two also toured together on multiple occasions and even lived together in West Berlin throughout a period of the eighties.
Some of the big names he’s worked with include John Lennon, Lou Reed, Bing Crosby, Pete Townshend, Queen, Tina Turner, Mick Jagger, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Peter Frampton, Trent Reznor, Toni Basil, Annie Lennox and everyone’s favorite actress-gone-singer Scarlett Johansson.
Bowie is a British National Treasure
David is number 29 out of 100 Greatest Britons. He is one of the ten best-selling musicians in UK pop history. He was previously offered the chance to be named as Commander of the British Empire in 2000 and a Knight in 2003, but he declined the opportunities. In 2003, the Sunday Express named Bowie as the second richest entertainer in the UK with over £510 million, but in 2005, Sunday Times Rich List said he actually only had £100 million.
His Eye is Permanently Dilated
At the age of 15, Bowie and his friend George Underwood got in a fight over a girl. George was wearing a ring and hit David in the eye, which resulted in David having to stay out of school for eight months so he could get multiple operations to protect his eye sight. He almost went blind from the incident and the pupil stayed permanently dilated and resulted in David’s having faulty depth perception. People commonly think his eyes are two different colors, but it only an illusion due to the extra blackness of the injured eye.
Even after the fight, David and George stayed friends and Bowie even hired Underwood to do the artwork on some of his early albums.
He Might be Bad Luck
David appeared on a show hosted by his friend Marc Bolan of T Rex in 1977. Shortly afterward, Bolan died in a car crash. For Christmas that year, he joined Bing Crosby in a rendition of “Little Drummer Boy.” Only one month after the record was complete, Crosby died. After that, Bowie was quoted as saying he was hesitant to be a guest artist anymore because, “everyone I was going on with was kicking it.”
He Really Gets His Kicks Acting
Aside from pretending to be other people in his concerts, he actually has always showed a big interest and aptitude in acting. His first major role was in the 1976 film, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Following the critical acclaim of that role, he expanded his acting resume by playing in the 1979 movie; Just a Gigolo; the 1980 Broadway production of The Elephant Man; the 1980 BBC’s adaptation of Baal; the 1986 film, Absolute Beginners; and his most famous role as the Goblin King in the Labyrinth. He’s since played in a number of movies including: The Last Temptation of Christ; The Linguini Incident; Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me; Basquiat; Gunslinger’s Revenge; Mr. Rice’s Secret; and The Prestige. He even received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 1997.
He’s Got A Revolving Door On His Closet
A common thought about David Bowie is “Is he gay or bi or not?” Unfortunately, this answer isn’t so clear. He seems to shed his sexuality as much as he changes his egos around.
In 1972, David outed himself in an interview with Melody Maker newspaper. Around this time, he also frequently fed on rumors that he and Iggy Pop were fooling around together. He repeated these rumors in a 1976 interview with Playboy, saying, “It’s true –I am a bisexual…I suppose it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
But then, he changed his tune. In a 1983 interview with Rolling Stone, he said, it was “the biggest mistake I ever made.” By 1993, he decided that he was always a “closet heterosexual” and that “it wasn’t something I was comfortable with at all.”
By 2002, he seemed to decide that being bisexual had more to do with where he was trying to sell records, saying “I don’t think it was a mistake in Europe, but it was a lot tougher in America. I had no problem with people knowing I was bisexual…I felt that [bisexuality] became my headline over here for so long. America is a very puritanical place, and I think it stood in the way of so much I wanted to do.”
The Life Aquatic With David Bowie
The soundtrack for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou featured cast member Seu Jorge singing a number of David Bowie songs with tracks slightly altered lyrics to fit the movie’s plot. Bowie later remarked, “Had Seu Jorge not recorded my songs acoustically in Portuguese I would never have heard this new level of beauty which he has imbued them with”
