‘Let’s Dance’: The song that David Bowie wished he’d never made
For David Bowie, every single album would be a creative risk. Even though he may have been able to make excellent odes to glam rock for the rest of his life, Bowie had his eye on experimentation half the time, crafting songs that were a different brand of rock and roll every time he stepped up to the microphone. While he lived on the fringes of the charts most of the time, the 1980s saw him taking things in a different direction.
During his 1970s prime, Bowie could have made a living by playing Ziggy Stardust. Creating the persona of a rock and roll alien, Bowie was free to be anything he wanted when he stepped up to the microphone, taking rock and roll back to its boundary-pushing origins on tracks like ‘The Jean Genie’.
Although Bowie had made a watershed moment in rock music with these albums, it wasn’t a sound he was looking to make a living in for the rest of his life. Quickly adopting the sounds of krautrock on the album Station to Station, Bowie would spend the next few years toying with what rock and roll could mean with producer Brian Eno.
Throughout the Berlin trilogy of albums, Bowie was on the cusp of inventing new genres like post-rock, creating different sonic textures where his voice practically fades into the background. Although Bowie worked outside the mainstream for most of the late 1970s, the new decade saw the sounds of pop music coming to him.
Being ahead of the curve in many ways, Bowie was starting to make brilliant use of synthesisers on albums like Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, with ‘Ashes to Ashes’ becoming one of his first major hits for the MTV market. Since Bowie had spent the last half of his career in the experimental world, he decided that now was the time to show the rest of the world how to make proper pop music.
Going into the studio with Nile Rogers, Let’s Dance would become one of Bowie’s most successful commercial albums, spawning tracks like the title song and ‘Modern Love’ onto the hit parade. Although Bowie loved the opportunity of working with Rogers, he did admit that he soured on the album as the years went on.
Trying to equal the success of Let’s Dance, Bowie would become jaded over the music he was making for the rest of the decade, telling Interview, “I pandered to that in my next few albums, and what I found I had done was put a box around myself. It was very hard for people to see me as anything other than the person in the suit who did ‘Let’s Dance’ – and it was driving me mad because it took all my passion for experimenting away.”
After trying his hand at more questionable albums like Never Let Me Down, Bowie would eventually return to his comfort zone on the fringes of rock and roll. Working with Rogers again on Black Tie White Noise, Bowie would usher in the next decade with the wildest songs of his career, working on conceptual pieces like Outside before diving into the world of drum and bass music again on Earthling. While Bowie probably was grateful for the success of his pop masterpiece, the success could be just as confining to him as it was gratifying.
