‘Let’s Dance’: the moment David Bowie changed music forever
If you were to pinpoint one singular artist who changed the entire musical landscape irrevocably, it would, without doubt, be David Bowie. But the truth of the matter was that he didn’t just land in 1969 with ‘Space Oddity’ and shake up the scene once – over the decades of his career, he did it time and time again with an almost nonchalant ease, whether it was through iconic songs, looks, or alter-egos.
All of this is to say that the moments where Bowie changed music forever were not standalone but many and massive. Yet through the litany of available choices, the story behind one particular song emerges as a turning point for not only Starman’s career but also that of so many others – and it boiled down to the imperative command of ‘Let’s Dance’.
The chart-topping hit from the album of the same name was undeniably the peak of Bowie’s tenure, combining all his genius genre-spanning forces into one to create a total mammoth tune. But the thing about the singer was that he was never one for resting on his laurels, despite all his transcendental allure – with each new era, like the one that the album of Let’s Dance heralded, he constantly reinvented himself to encompass an ever-growing musical catalogue, and with that harnessed new talent to boot.
In 1982, Bowie left his last record deal, disillusioned by the state of the industry, but he enlisted a celebrity friend—Nile Rodgers—to help give him some divine inspiration. Rodgers was less than convinced, believing Bowie to still be in his art rock era until he gave him the ultimatum: “I want you to make hits.”
Nevertheless, it wasn’t an instant partnership. Bowie had initially written ‘Let’s Dance’ with a folkish-inspired tone, to which Rodgers responded: “I was like, ‘That’s not happening, man’. It totally threw me. It was not a song you could dance to.” Subsequently, an overhaul was needed – and the result was a seven-minute warbling epic of guitar, percussion, trumpet, and saxophone, mixing the genres of rock, funk, new wave, dance, and post-disco in its midst.
Despite its sprawling soundtrack, however, the reason that ‘Let’s Dance’ truly changed music forever was because it gave birth to the career of a future giant of the scene without even knowing it at the time. Having heard him play at the Montreux Jazz Festival and then recruiting him to play guitar overdubs on the track, Bowie took a then-unknown blues guitarist by the name of Stevie Ray Vaughan under his wing and subsequently set him too on a world-changing trajectory. As Rodgers himself put it, “[Vaughan] could sense this group of anonymous musicians were about to make history.”
And that they did. ‘Let’s Dance’ captured a vision that was all at once perfectly rooted in its musical moment but equally blazing towards the future, pulling the forces of Bowie’s genre-spanning approach into one mass reckoning that ultimately proved to be pivotal in more ways than one. The rest of his journey throughout the 1980s ended up being less than plain sailing, but nevertheless, there’s still something quite symbolic in the way he passed Vaughan the torch.
