Week 31 | Let’s Dance (1983)

One of Bowie’s most famous albums— the one that got him his first Time Magazine cover (his death earned him his second cover)— Let’s Dance was the zenith of his career as a pop star. Though he had had hits before, “Let’s Dance” broadened Bowie’s appeal to the point that many of his longstanding fans found to be annoying. Consequently, the album is sometimes unjustly derided as a sellout, ushering in several years of a duller version of Bowie than had churned out innovative music during the 1970s. That is not my view at all. To begin with, “Let’s Dance” is a near-great album. It contains three songs that everyone knows and stand up because they are great songs. You know the songs— “Let’s Dance,” “Modern Love,” and “China Girl.” Maybe you don’t like these songs because they were too ubiquitous in 1983 and the scar remains. Maybe you don’t like them as a gut reaction to anything embraced by pop culture. But unless you don’t like rock music at all, its hard for me to believe anyone doesn’t like these songs as music.

The album is not flawless and not my favorite (though again, I like it very much). It was released before the advent of CDs, so the song order was more important at the time. The album’s first side starts off with the three aforementioned songs but ends with a somewhat forgettable fourth song, “Without You.” The second side is much weaker, the exception being a version of “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” which, while good, is in my mind inferior to the version from the “Cat People” soundtrack. The other three songs, “Ricochet,” “Criminal World,” and “Shake It” are not bad songs, but they feel tacked on. I rarely if ever listen to them unless I am listening to the entire album. But its relatively weak second side is not the typical reason “Let’s Dance” is criticized.

One of the things I came to appreciate about Bowie by reading retrospectives and appreciations after he died is that much of the affection toward him came from people who felt different, isolated or like outsiders at some point in their lives. Bowie knew how to celebrate the weird. “Let’s Dance” is not that. Moreover, the album’s short-term legacy would be two of Bowie’s least loved albums, “Tonight” and “Never Let Me Down.” A take I have repeatedly encountered on those later albums is that Bowie was simply trying to (unsuccessfully, from an artistic perspective) recapture his pop-success with “Let’s Dance.” So in this view, the one album spawned the other two, and therefor is at fault.

I wasn’t always a fan. “Let’s Dance” was a hit before I liked Bowie. My mother and sister went to see the Serious Moonlight tour in Buffalo- I had no desire to go. (My mother always thought the line, “serious moonlight” was hilarious). I have come to regret my disinterest at the time.

In time, though, “Let’s Dance” seems to have regained some respect. After Bowie’s death, I journeyed to the shrine fans had built outside his apartment in New York City. One of the most prominent pieces of graffiti nearby was a crudely illustrated figure hugging a heart as part of an “I Love New York” motif, labeled with the spray-painted words, “Let’s Dance.” By 2016, Bowie was cool again. To me, somehow New York City graffiti paying a final tribute to a departed neighbor with these words also telegraphed that “Let’s Dance” was cool again too.