Let's Dance (1983)

The Bowie Project #16 – Let’s Dance (1983)

Let’s Dance is David Bowie’s 15th studio album, it was released on 14 April 1983, by EMI Records. After the release of his previous album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980 Bowie began a period of musical collaborations and film appearances. He appeared on stage in productions of The Elephant Man and Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, he released the legendary track “Under Pressure” with Queen as well as providing the title song to the 1982 Paul Schrader movie Cat People, he also filmed leading roles in the movies The Hunger and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. For the release of this album, he cut ties with his record label RCA Records and for the first time in many years Tony Visconti did not act as his album's producer. After so much musical experimentation Bowie wanted a commercial hit record and instead hired disco producer Nile Rodgers to produce this record. Nile Rodgers is Chic bandleader and guitars who had scored numerous top ten hits and helped propel disco into a new level of popularity, previous to this Rodgers had scored hits for Sister Sledge, “We are Family”, and Diana Ross, “Upside Down” and Bowie wanted a taste of that mainstream success.

Originally Tony Visconti was slated to produce this record and had even cleared up his schedule to make sure he was free. The time came and nobody had contacted him so he took matters into his own hands and was told that Bowie had already been in the studio for two weeks making music and that his services would not be needed on this album. Visconti took this personally and it led to a falling out between himself and Bowie and they would not work together again until Heathen in 2002. Rodgers said he was surprised when he met with Bowie in Switzerland how keen he was to make a commercial album: “I was expecting Scary Monsters 2” he said, but Bowie told him “I just want to make a groove record” he added “Nile, I really want you to make hit”. Bowie had always been a bit of a sucker for fame and it’s a strange relationship when you look into it.

David Bowie and Nile Rodgers

In his early days making music in the 1960s Bowie was really eager for success, his first album is a mishmash of so many styles and genres and he hasn’t really found his feet but he desperately wants to be part of the burgeoning music scene in the 1960s. He continued to make albums playing with so many different styles: R&B, psychedelic rock, hard rock, piano based ballads, before finally scoring major success with glam rock and Ziggy Stardust. At this point he had achieved what he set out to do and the following albums dealt explicitly with the pitfalls of fame and the power and responsibilities of being a performer. Then we get into drug addiction and the excessive lifestyle he had in Los Angeles in the 1970s before his more experimental work in Europe and Berlin. After all this you would imagine that Bowie would be disillusioned and pretty privy to what he means to be a success, but yet he still seems to crave further acknowledgement, he wanted to be number one in the world and he still hadn’t quite achieved that level of recognition. With Let’s Dance Bowie is trying to appeal to the masses in a way he never really had before, even with the success of Ziggy Stardust he was still considered an outsider in mainstream society, his gender bending androgyny had him firmly placed as something alternative people listen to. With Let’s Dance he would reach number one all over the world with EMI declaring it their fastest selling record since Sgt Pepper’s almost all of his old albums began to chart again and by July 1983, he had ten albums in the UK top 100. His songs were all over the radio, he was all over MTV, for better or worse Bowie was in the mainstream now and it was the beginning of a period he would later negatively refer to as “my Phil Collins years”. This was the first album Bowie made where he did not play any of the instruments and just provided the vocals further emphasising his new role as mainstream superstar rather than serious musician.

The album opens incredibly strong with one of my favourite Bowie tracks “Modern Love” a song that according to music critic Dave Thompson “epitomises all that was good about Bowie's 1983 reinvention as a willing superstar”. Right from the get go you can tell this is going to be a different experience than other Bowie records, it’s more commercial but also upbeat, danceable and fun. The lyrics are superficial “get me to the church on time” but it’s about modern love so what’s more superficial than that? The call-and-response nature of the song was inspired by Little Richard in particular his track “True Fine Mama”. The song is so great even jilted producer Tony Visconti couldn’t deny it saying “it sounds like Bowie singing with Chic, but what a great success it was for him. I’m a big fan of the records that Bowie made without me. There is no jealousy, only admiration”. This song and the entire album also features guitar work from the then practically unknown Stevie Ray Vaughan who would go on to become one of the work acclaimed guitarists of all time. In terms of opening album tracks it has to be one of the best ever, straight out the gate we are grooving and dancing, and this is probably the best representation of this era of Bowie’s career.

Things stay strong with the next track “China Girl” although this is a song that first appeared on the Bowie produced Iggy Pop album The Idiot in 1977, the song was co-written by the duo and Bowie does make it his own here, however this is the first inclination that creatively Bowie might not be as prolific at this point as previously seen. Out of the album’s eight tracks only 5 of them are totally original as Bowie said he wanted to see how Rodgers would tackle and transform some old work as well as a cover. “China Girl” was a success as it shed some of the darker more experimental nature of the Iggy Pop version and added an upbeat poppier sound with BBC reviewer David Quantick stating only Rodgers could take paranoid references to “visions of swastikas', and turned it into a sweet, romantic hit single”. The song reached number 2 in the UK charts and the co-writing credit for Iggy Pop led to an influx of residuals that gave the legendary rocker a real taste of financial stability.

Of course, the big hit of the album is the title track “Let’s Dance” a song that has become so omnipresent in the world of popular culture today that sometimes it’s easy to fail to notice how incredible it is. This song holds the honour of being the only Bowie track to reach number one in both the US and the UK; it was a mega hit everywhere. Its success is down the Nile Rodgers production, he later stated when Bowie first showed him the track he was like almost a country folk song and described it as “Anthony Newely meets Donovan” added “and I don’t mean that as a compliment. The song has a funk beat, with trumpets, saxophone, and backup vocals. It is essentially just repeating “let’s dance” over and over but it’s so catchy and has such a groove you can’t help but love it. The song introduced Bowie to whole new section of fans were who totally unaware of his previous work, this brought him great success with also led to problems, with Bowie saying he didn’t know who his new fans were or what they wanted and his next two follow up albums would be an attempt to cater to them rather than explore his own creative impulses. Let’s Dance was made out of a real sense of looking for commercial success but also artistic integrity, after this record Bowie would enter a hole, and he takes him a while to dig himself out of it.

“Without You” was also released as a single and is a more laidback moment on the record. Nile Rodgers produced records normally featuring Chic as the backup band but with this album he didn’t want to risk it, as he felt their drug use was starting to become a little bit excessive and didn’t want to derail the production of a Bowie record. However, this song features Chic bassist Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson on drums so this post-disco ballad is really the only track you could truly say features David Bowie with Chic. It’s a mellow song and probably one of the album’s lesser moments.

The most experimental song on the album is “Ricochet'' which in a way melds Bowie’s art rock past with his commercial present. Bowie was unhappy with production on this song and Rodgers was flummoxed by it, for how well they worked together this is the moment that their different musical impulses collided. Bowie said in 1987: “The beat wasn’t quite right. It didn’t roll the way it should have, the syncopation was wrong. It had an ungainly gait; it should have flowed.” There was a sense that Rodgers just didn’t know what to do with the song and was throwing everything at the wall seeing what stuck with him saying “Bowie just threw it together and I went out and wrote the horn arrangement, the dit-ditdit, all that stuff”. It might be a bit of a bad combination but the song itself is interesting, one of the album’s weirder moments and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“Criminal World” is a cover version of a song by the little known British new wave Metro that was first released in 1977. The original version of the song was banned by the BBC for bisexual overtones in the lyrics like “I saw you kneeling at my brother’s door, that was no ordinary stick-up”. This ties in with Bowie’s admission of his bisexuality, however by this point in the 80s he was trying to downplay that image and changed the lyric to “sister’s door” and in an interview with Rolling Stone the year this album came out said “The biggest mistake I ever made was telling that Melody Maker writer that I was bisexual. Christ, I was so young then. I was experimenting”. For some who would have regarded Bowie as an LGBT icon who helped normalise alternative lifestyles these types of dismissals of his past felt like a betrayal.

“Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” was a reworking of the title track for the 1982 film Cat People. Bowie was unhappy with the original recording and wanted to see what Rodgers would do with it. The Let’s Dance version removes a lot of the atmospheric synth-work of the original with a more aggressive re-recording. Many consider Bowie’s original recording as one of the best of the era with brooding and effective vocals. Music critic Dave Thompson panned the re-make as” declawed and neutered” and fans of the original should steer clear of this one.

The album closes with “Shake It” an upbeat song that is ultimately totally lacking in any real substance, a keyboard synth-y background with very un-Bowie-like backup vocals. There’s nothing really going on in the lyrics either. It is an enjoyable enough song but the contrast between the opening of this album and it’s closing song is striking, the album definitely loses steam along the way after the hattrick of “Modern Love,” into “China Girl”, before getting to “Let’s Dance” things never pick up quite that amount of steam again on the record.

As we’ve previously mentioned this record was a success in a way that no previous Bowie album (or subsequent) ever really was. It was nominated for album of the year at the Grammys but lost out to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. It’s success in a way was a double edge sword because it would pigeonhole him as he was expected to deliver more of the same and that was something Bowie was not used to doing. He later said:

“It was a good record, but it was only meant as a one-off project. I had every intention of continuing to do some unusual material after that. But the success of that record really forced me, in a way, to continue the beast. It was my own doing, of course, but I felt, after a few years, that I had gotten stuck”

Former producer Tony Visconti said that “it was an album he had to make”. Bowie was getting something out of system, although he had achieved great success, he wanted to see what it was like at the very top and later said that it was more Nile Rodgers album than his, to which Rodgers disagreed. In a sense it was Bowie’s least challenging album but retrospectively it has been said “to set the template for alternative dance for the next 30 years”. It has been ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and has been consistently placed on lists of best albums of the 1980s. It might not be revolutionary but there is a lot to love here, and I am sure this is a record that opened the door for many a Bowie fan to explore his more artistically daring works.

Let’s Dance (1983) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ [7/10]