Mike Garson's long piano solo is fabulously imaginative and suggestive, incorporating snatches of Rhapsody In Blue and "Tequila". Only a couple of words of the lyrics indicate over what point the song title's question mark must be hovering. The reference to sake, the Japanese drink, in the first verse, and the last verse's "Millions weep a fountain/just in case of sunrise" suggest the land of the rising sun as a potentially significant future locale. While writing this album, Bowie decided to tour Japan (where he has recently been performing), and Ziggy was described on the last album as "like some cat from Japan". The relationship of Aladdin's visitations to the outbreak of war is not clear. Is it his appearance, or our failure to embrace him, which plunges us into strife?

Although a good portion of the songs on Aladdin Sane are hard rock & roll, a closer inspection reveals them to be advertisements for their own obsolescence -- vignettes in which the baton is being passed on to a newer sensibility. "Watch That Man", the album's opening number, is inimitable Stones, Exile vintage. Mick Ronson plays Chuck Berry licks via Keith Richard, Garson plays at being Nicky Hopkins, Bowie slurs his lines, and the female backup singers and horns make appropriate noises. Like Ziggy, one of the subjects of Aladdin Sane is rock & roll (and its lynchpin, sex), only here it is extended to include its ultimate exponents, the Stones.

Taking up the warning he gave in "Changes" - "Look out you rock & rollers/Pretty soon you're gonna get a little older" - David presents "an old-fashioned band of married men/Looking up to me for encouragement". To emphasize the archaism of these fellows, there are references to Benny Goodman and "Tiger Rag". Jagger himself has become so dainty "that he could eat you with a fork and spoon".

"Let's Spend the Night Together" continues the Stones preoccupation. Here, one of the most ostensibly heterosexual calls in rock is made into a bi-anthem: The cover version is a means to an ultimate revisionism. The rendition here is campy, butch, brittle and unsatisfying. Bowie is asking us to re-perceive "Let's Spend the Night Together" as a gay song, possibly from its inception. Sexual ambiguity in rock has existed long before any audience was attuned to it. However, though Bowie's point is well taken, his methods are not.

"Drive-In Saturday" was conceived during Bowie's passage through the Arizona desert. It is a fantasy in which the populace, after some terrible holocaust, has forgotten how to make love. To learn again they take courses at the local drive-in, where they view films in which "like once before...people stared in Jagger's eyes and scored".

"Panic in Detroit" places us right in the middle of a battered urban scape. Ronson deals out a compelling Bo Diddley beat which quickly leads into a helter-skelter descending scale. The song is a paranoid descendant of the Motor City's earlier masterpiece, Martha and the Vandellas' "Nowhere To Run". The hero is "the only surviver of the National People's Gang", the revolutionary as a star (shades of Sinclair), Che as wall poster. By the end of the song, all that is left to claim his revolutionary immortality is a suicide note, an "autograph" poignantly inscribed "Let me collect dust".

Rock and revolutionary stardom are not the only varieties which are doomed. In his work Bowie is often contemptuous of actors, yet his is, above all, an actor. His intent on "Cracked Actor", a portrait of an aging screen idol, vicious, conceited, mercenarky, the object of the ministrations of a male gigolo, is to strip the subject of his validity, as he has done with the rocker, as a step towards a re-definition of these roles and his own inhabiting of them. "The Prettiest Star", the album's other slice of cinematic life, again asserts the connection between secular and celestial stardom. But the song itself is too self-consciously vaudeville.

"Time" is a bit of Brecht/Weill, a bit of Brel. All the world's not a stage, but a dressing room, in which Time holds sway, exacts payment. Once we're on, as in all theaters, time is suspended and will no longer "In quaaludes and red wine" be "Demanding Billy Dolls" - a reference to the death of Billy Murcia in London last summer.

The appeal to an afterlife, or its equivalent, which is implied in this song, using the theater as its metaphor, is further clarified in "Lady Grinning Soul". The song is beautifully arranged; Ronson's guitar, both six-string and twelve, elsewhere so muscular, is here, except for some faulty intonation on the acoustic solo, very poetic. Bowie, a ballad singer at heart, which lends his rock singing its special edge, gives "Lady Grinning Soul" the album's most expansive and sincere vocal.

Aladdin Sane works over the same themes that were raised in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - issuances from the Bowie schema that date back to The Man Who Sold the World. Bowie is cognizant that religion's geography - the heavens - has been usurped, either by science or by actual beings.