‘Magic Dance’: The truly awful David Bowie song that is OK to hate
Yes, you may have loved Labyrinth’s moment when David Bowie starts rapping to a gaggle of Jim Henson puppetry as a child, but ‘Magic Dance’ is without a doubt the ‘Cracked Actor’s’ lowest ebb.
Ten years earlier, it was all so different. Having already scarpered from glam before it grew stale as quickly as he’d defined it, Bowie’s shaking off the Ziggy-Martian alter-ego unveiled an endless creative hinterland his restless artistry hungrily grabbed at for the rest of the 1970s. Jumping into plastic soul before setting the ensuing post-punk wave with his electronically spooked Low and “Heroes” records, he had established himself as the era’s defining artist.
He entered the 1980s amid his acclaimed purple patch, dropping 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) that sat authentically among the new wave and synthpop generation and bookended the last of the classic album run.
On the other hand, he was also making interesting film and TV projects, appearing in cutting-edge movies such as the West German drug drama Christiane F, Alan Clarke’s raw interpretation of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal for the BBC, and skulking about with just the right amount of vampiric cool in Tony Scott’s saucy The Hunger. Even his cameo in Channel 4’s festive The Snowman glows with a warm integrity channelled from somewhere sincere.
Then ‘Let’s Dance’ happened. A great song, a monster song even, a gargantuan slick-funk behemoth that pushed its namesake album to a level of Billboard success that eclipsed anything released from his 1970s heyday. Bowie got what he wanted.
Seeking the pop fortunes of Chic’s Nile Rodgers studio magic over longtime producer Tony Visconti and chasing a piece of MTV superstardom, his platinum blonde hair and suited cartoon snazz that formed the Serious Moonlight Tour’s wardrobe was beamed straight into mainstream awareness, propelling Bowie to a superstar. Yet, his elevated pop stature came at a cost.
His formerly razor-sharp artistic antenna seemed to wane, inspiring a string of glossy pap records like Tonight and Never Let Me Down, the opulently kitsch and bloated tedium of 1987’s Glass Spider Tour, and atrocious collaborations with the likes of Mick Jagger—similarly suffering from an artistic crisis at the time—on the eternal infamy of their ‘Dancing in the Street’ cover and its bafflingly bad video. The Berlin Trilogy felt like ancient history.
At the centre of Bowie’s descent into camp nonsense was 1986’s Labyrinth. Playing the role of the movie’s arch-villain Jareth the Goblin King, Bowie keeps a baby in his evil possession, and should the protagonist and elder sister, Sarah Williams, played by a young Jennifer Connelly, not rescue her brother, he will turn into a goblin forever.
To be fair to the Henson puppet team, they had dropped the infinitely more respectable The Dark Crystal four years earlier, a charming fantasy adventure with genuine thrills and menace, and crucially, lacking a hefty songbook. Labyrinth galumphs along its high camp with everything God-awful about pop toward the end of the 1980s, with ‘Magic Dance’ its wincingly, aggressively terrible aural dentist drill.
It’s fucking gipping, and no amount of nostalgic fug can obscure its chintzy pummel. Bowie’s crooning rap attack, soulless and soggy drum machine chug, infantile nursery rhyme lyrical dribbles, and an acutely excruciating chorus of high-pitched fantasy imp backing vocals make for a real jab in the ears.
It should have been fine on paper. Why can’t one of rock’s biggest stars be a bit silly in a family feature? But with a bang average story and a dearth of creative vim that would take Tin Machine to exorcise, ‘Magic Dance’ and Bowie’s skulking kitsch in Labyrinth’s tacky ’80s horror show is less cherished children’s canon and more Michael Jackson’s Captain EO without its mercifully short length.
