It's one of those albums it took me ages to come around to too. I had to discover my love for Bowie first. That was the key for me, and Ziggy didn't bring me there on its own. Jumping right in and listening to what other people think is an artist's masterpiece is usually a terrible idea (how many people have a copy of Kind Of Blue lying around in their music collections without the faintest idea of how to approach it?), but it's also exactly what you did back when I started buying CDs. You couldn't spend hundreds of bucks buying all the albums and singles that came before it to see the introduction and maturing of ideas and artistic vision, so you went for the big ones right away, and if you didn't find them immediately accessible you usually stopped there.
There has been a ton of things written about that record's place in music history; people have picked it apart down to the most banal chord and fetichised both the album and the character of Ziggy in ways I'll never understand, but they got one thing right: it's a damn masterpiece. A song like Five Years is as good as Bowie ever got at describing the overwhelming present with his cut up, almost steam of consciousness-like lyrics that somehow still seem just as coherent as your average folk song when you hear him sing the words. You really hear him live in the stories he tells.
