Aladdin Sane is the sixth studio album by David Bowie, released by RCA Records on 13 April 1973. It is the follow-up to the groundbreaking The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and was the first album Bowie wrote and released to achieve such a major impact on the music scene.

The editors of New Musical Express, Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray, described the album as “particularly unsatisfying, given the amount of material it contained”, while Bowie encyclopaedist Nicholas Pegg described it as “one of the most powerful, compelling and essential albums in modern music”. Rolling Stone’s Ben Gerson review described it as “less manic than The Man Who Sold The World, and less intimate than Hunky Dory”. On the album cover, Bowie’s face is considered one of his most iconic photographs.

In 2003, the album was ranked at No. 277 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and later at No. 77 on Pitchfork Media’s list of the 100 Greatest Albums of the ‘70s.

The album’s name was derived from a variation of the phrase “A Lad Insane”. An early variation was “Love Aladdin Vein”, which David Bowie rejected in part due to its drug associations. The lack of the thematic flow of the previous album led Bowie to describe Aladdin Sane as simply “Ziggy goes to America”. Most of the album’s tracks were various observations that Bowie composed on the road during his 1972 US tour, which corresponded to the place names after each song title on the album. Biographer Christopher Sandford believed that the album showed Bowie “being both abhorrent and fixated on America”.

His mixed feelings about the trip stemmed, in Bowie’s own words, “from wanting to be on stage, performing my songs, but on the other hand not wanting to be on buses with all those strange people…” Thus Aladdin Sane, this kind of “schizophrenia”, as Bowie described it, was carried over into his makeup on the cover, which represents the duality of the mind, although he would later tell friends that the “madman” of the album title was inspired by his brother Terry, who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Aladdin Sane was released with 100,000 pre-ordered copies, reaching the top of the British charts and reaching No. 17 in the US, becoming Bowie’s most commercially successful album in both countries to that time. The album is estimated to have sold a total of 4.6 million copies worldwide and is considered one of Bowie’s best-selling LPs.

From this excellent album I select the track “Lady Grinning Soul”.
 
Tracklist

1. Watch That Man 4:30
2. Aladdin Sane 5:15
3. Drive-In Saturday 4:38
4. Panic In Detroit 4:30
5. Cracked Actor 3:01
6. Time 5:10
7. The Prettiest Star 3:28
8. Let’s Spend The Night Together 3:10
9. The Jean Genie 4:06
10. Lady Grinning Soul 3:53