How David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” Changed Music

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In 1983, Bowie’s reinvention took a surprising turn with his wildly successful album Let’s Dance. While most of his previous albums had ridden a dark and cutting edge of popular and avante-garde, Let’s Dance was relatively optimistic and strategically poised for mainstream success. Prior to the album’s release, Bowie explained: “It occurred to me that a lot of things that I’ve done…have been pretty much in a direction of singularity and isolationist and quite cold and I just felt…that I wanted to do something with the kind of warmth that I feel missing…in music generally, and from society.” Bowie was attempting to connect with his audience and the world in a new way, and was commercially rewarded for his efforts. The album produced three hit singles, including “Modern Love,” “China Girl” and “Let’s Dance” – the last of which holds the honor of giving Bowie his first transatlantic #1 hit. The album was nominated for an Album of the Year Grammy in 1984, although it lost to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. In the midst of all this success, the album’s title track deserves special attention for its remarkable fusion of musical styles and influences into a commercially attractive hit track, while still carrying so much of the poignancy that has defined Bowie’s career.

“Let’s Dance” becomes a contemporary imagining of the radical spirit of rock and roll that had characterized the genre’s birth. It rejects the evolution of rock towards music intended primarily for listening – a paradigm in which Bowie had already proven his skill – and returns it to its origins on the dance floor. In hindsight, we can see the qualities that made it a massive success, but at the time, it was a risky calculation. Dance music, as the Disco Demolition Night highlights, was framed as the antithesis of rock music, and as Rodgers poignantly reminds us, a color line still dominated these tensions: “When David and I began working together, not only did the people on paper not think it would work, he caught a lot of flack from his friends and inner circle and didn’t mind sharing it with me. He would actually be perplexed at how shocked they were, because to him, Bowie just thought of people as people. So he couldn’t believe it when people would say, “Oh man, you’re working with that disco dude,” and probably there were other kinds of, “You’re working with that black disco dude.” Meaning if it were a white disco dude, it might be more okay.” In this way, the reinvention of Bowie for Let’s Dance, despite his new-found optimism and commercial aspirations, maintains some of the boundary pushing “spikiness” (to quote Bowie’s own assessment of his work), which had characterized his career leading up to this project. In creating a popular sound that would transverse across the disco/rock divide and appeal to all listeners, “Let’s Dance” fittingly rides that cutting edge of cultural and sonic discomfort that Little Richard’s rock and roll image had carried in the fifties.

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