As ‘Diamond Dogs’ Turns 50, the Meaning Behind “Rebel Rebel” by David Bowie

Exhausted and creatively in flux, David Bowie released his 1973 album Pin Ups to appease his record label. Then, he disbanded the Spiders from Mars and planned to create a musical.

Desperate to move on from Ziggy Stardust, he created his eighth studio album, Diamond Dogs, from the rubble of abandoned projects. It’s a beautifully complex and dark album featuring the glam rock anthem “Rebel Rebel.”

Diamond Dogs turns 50 this year, and it’s an enduring chapter in Bowie’s legacy. “Rebel Rebel” is also the sound of Bowie exiting the scene he made famous.

A Farewell to Glam

Bowie’s glam anthem follows a character whose androgyny leaves his parents “in a whirl.” Mixing Hollywood glamour and cabaret theatrics, Bowie enabled glam rock with its archetypal star Marc Bolan, and “Rebel Rebel” mirrors Bolan’s swaggering riffs.

Biographer Marc Spitz said the lyrics to “Rebel Rebel” use Bowie’s familiar themes about a young “tramp” tormenting their parents with “sexy nihilism.”

You’ve got your mother in a whirl
She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl
Hey babe, your hair’s alright
Hey babe, let’s go out tonight
You like me, and I like it all
We like dancing, and we look divine
You love bands when they’re playing hard
You want more, and you want it fast

Bowie doesn’t assign gender in “Rebel Rebel.” Instead, the rebel in a torn dress has a handful of ludes and wants to be there when they count up the dudes.

Rebel rebel, how could they know?
Hot tramp, I love you so

“Rebel Rebel” is one of Bowie’s defining songs, but it was also his farewell to glam rock. After releasing Diamond Dogs in 1974, Bowie embraced R&B and soul music the following year with Young Americans.

He replaced the grit and decadence of glam rock with the smooth funk of “Fame.” Bowie’s glossy photo on the Young Americans album cover introduced his reinvention. However, he’d already foreshadowed his pivot to soul music on Diamond Dogs.

Rolling Stones Guitar Riff

Bowie thought of the Keith Richards-inspired riff, and guitarist Alan Parker helped him shape the final arrangement.

Parker told Uncut that Bowie wanted to “piss Mick [Jagger] off a bit.” Bowie created an iconic guitar riff without his longtime guitarist Mick Ronson, who was busy with his first solo album, Slaughter on 10th Avenue, following the Spiders from Mars’ dismissal.  

The guitar riff’s high-mid tone and texture inspired Suede’s Bernard Butler during Britpop’s nascent years. The DNA of Suede’s mighty 1993 self-titled debut is the offspring of Bowie’s glam and The Smiths’ Victorian gloom.

Without Ronson, Bowie transformed independently and played most of the guitar parts on Diamond Dogs while producing the album alone. Tony Visconti mixed the album with Bowie and contributed string arrangements on “1984.”

Doom and Gloom

Diamond Dogs reached No. 1 in the UK, Bowie’s third consecutive album to do so, but it also became his breakthrough album in the U.S.  

Bowie had long wiped away the starry idealism of ’60s hippie culture and replaced it with an album that not only documented dread but reveled in nihilism.

William S. Burroughs’s cut-up writing technique persists in Bowie’s apocalyptic Hunger City and the bleak future in Diamond Dogs borrowed from George Orwell’s dystopian 1984.

The Death of Glam

Bowie planned to use “Rebel Rebel” for the Ziggy Stardust musical, finishing an arc he began with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

His creation of his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, reveals an awareness of rock ‘n’ roll’s steepest falls. So, “Rebel Rebel” is the perfect storybook ending to his involvement with the movement.  

Five months after Bowie released Diamond Dogs, Iggy Pop joined the New York Dolls to bury glam rock in Los Angeles. The event became known as the Death of Glitter, as Simon Reynolds tells in his book Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century.

But glam rock didn’t die then. Punk rock temporarily made it irrelevant until Prince appeared in heels, or a Los Angeles-based band (and Slade devotees) called Quiet Riot formed with a guitarist named Randy Rhoads, who resembled Mick Ronson. By the ’80s, glam dominated the Sunset Strip before it conquered MTV.

Lady Gaga and Harry Styles have kept things glittering, and don’t forget Sam Smith’s massive 2022 hit “Unholy” with Kim Petras. The decadence in “Unholy” would have been right at home in Bowie’s Hunger City.

However, music is reactionary. It cycles from glam to anti-glam before recycling again. Grunge was anti-glam until it, too, became pop music.

Ultimately, glam celebrates fame, and fame is something we humans can’t quit.

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Photo by Steve Morley/Redferns/Getty Images