The Secretly Subversive Song on Let’s Dance

Bowie’s “Criminal World”: A Hidden Message in Plain Sight

With Let’s Dance, David Bowie made a conscious shift from the edgy, countercultural artist of the ‘70s to a mainstream pop icon. The album was designed to be accessible, a polished, radio-friendly sound that would make him a megastar — especially in the conformist U.S.A.— in ways even Ziggy Stardust never had. To get there, Bowie made deliberate choices—not just in sound, but in how he presented himself.

Gone were the gender-fluid, provocative aesthetics of his Diamond Dogs or Hunky Dory days. His androgyny and public embrace of bisexuality were replaced by a clean-cut, sharply dressed image that felt far removed from his earlier personae. And if there was any doubt about this rebranding, he hammered the point home with the video for “China Girl,” which, in contrast to his past play with sexual ambiguity, featured a fairly explicit heterosexual sex scene.

But Bowie was never one to abandon his past entirely. Instead, he had a habit of hiding in plain sight—burying meaning beneath layers of misdirection, winks to those paying attention. Let’s Dance may have seemed like a clean break, but beneath the glossy pop exterior, traces of the “old” Bowie hid under the surface, waiting to be discovered by anyone who looked. One of the clearest examples of this? His decision to cover “Criminal World,” an obscure song by an even more obscure band called Metro.

The Cover That Wasn’t Meant to Stand Out

“Criminal World” was not one of the Let’s Dance singles.* It never became a hit, and to my knowledge Bowie never performed it live. Tucked away on the album’s B-side, it was easily overlooked by the millions who bought the record for its chart-topping singles. But to those who recognized the song, Bowie’s choice to include it was a quiet nod to a past that he was, at least publicly, distancing himself from.

Originally released in 1977, “Criminal World” had been banned by the BBC for its suggestive lyrics, which contained thinly veiled references to cross-dressing, same-sex attraction, and androgyny. Metro, the band behind it, never broke through to mainstream success, and by 1983, they were largely forgotten. The fact that Bowie covered “Criminal World” at all suggests he wanted to signal to longtime fans that he was still David Bowie,—even as he crafted an album designed for mass appeal.

That said, he didn’t necessarily make it easy for those longtime fans searching for traces of what they liked about Bowie in the first place (aside, of course, from his singing voice, which is not typically what comes under fire from critics of Bowie’s 80s output). Bowie liked to make fans work to interpret his songs, often with oblique lyrics. In this case, didn’t leave the song’s original lyrics entirely intact.

How Bowie Changed “Criminal World”—and What He Kept

Bowie made several lyric changes, all aimed at softening—or at least making less overt—the song’s original implications.

Original lyric: “I’m not the queen so there’s no need to bow / I think I see beneath your make-up / I’ll take your dress and we can truck on out.”
Bowie’s version: “I guess I recognize your destination / I think I see beneath your make-up / What you want is sort of separation.”

Bowie removed the gendered reference to “the queen” and eliminated the line about taking a dress, which could suggest cross-dressing.

Original lyric: “I saw you kneeling at my brother’s door / That was no ordinary stick-up.”
Bowie’s version: “You caught me kneeling at your sister’s door.”

The original lyric was ambiguous but could be read as homoerotic. Bowie’s change made it seemingly heterosexual— or nonsensical.

These changes fit the version of Bowie that Let’s Dance was selling to the world—one that no longer played openly with gender and sexuality the way he had in the 1970s. But Bowie being Bowie, he didn’t erase the meaning entirely. Instead, he just buried it deeper.

A Quiet Signal to Those Paying Attention

For those unfamiliar with “Criminal World,” Bowie’s version sounded like just another song in the tracklist and is sometimes dismissed as filler. But for anyone who already knew the song, the implications were clear. The lyric changes didn’t remove the song’s underlying themes (let alone its history)—they just made them less obvious. If anything, this was in line with Bowie’s lifelong habit of obscuring meaning behind cut-up or otherwise altered lyrics, cryptic storytelling, and layers of artifice.

The average Let’s Dance fan probably never thought twice about “Criminal World.” But for longtime fans who chose to dig a little deeper, there was more of the “old” Bowie hidden in Let’s Dance than first met the ear. In the past, Bowie shined a light on his use of gay-messaging, such as his very overt use of polari phrases in “Queen Bitch” (which, if the lyrics alone were too obscure, the song’s title kind of knocked you in the face). In a sense, then “Criminal World” was even more subversive in the sense that he really was speaking in code.

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* “Criminal World” was never released as a single, but was a b-side to the nearly-as-obscure “Without You.”