The song David Bowie said “took all my passion” away
David Bowie was a man of many faces. With each new chapter of his career, he adopted a new skin, taking on a new character with new stories to tell and new sounds to tell them with. There was the futuristic high glamour of Ziggy Stardust, the darkness of Aladdin Sane, and the sleazy rock of the Thin White Duke. But to plenty of casual listeners, there is only a man in a suit dancing to ‘Let’s Dance’.
While Bowie had more than his fair share of huge hits that have now become timeless classics, none reached the heights that ‘Let’s Dance’ did. Even though the star is now considered one of the brightest talents in musical history and is one of the most well-known artists to ever exist, in the earliest decades of his career, Bowie was simply striving away like any hopeful musician, trying to build a career and grow while still keeping his creativity alive.
It’s a challenge that’s discussed time and time again in music: the difficulty of attempting to balance creative authenticity with popularity. It’s tough to walk a tightrope between experimentation and success, with one always seeming to pose a risk to another.
For Bowie, it certainly did as he admitted that his most commercially successful era was his most draining one. While he’s been building and building a cultish fan base for years prior, he had still remained largely an underground sensation, popular with the weirdos and freaks he wanted to appeal to. But when he released ‘Let’s Dance’, suddenly it was a song for the masses.
“I tried passionately hard in the first part of the ’80s to fit in, and I had my first overground success,” Bowie told Interview magazine back in 1995, “I was suddenly no longer ‘the world’s biggest cult artist’ in popular music.”
It wasn’t even just “overground success”; it was a complete and total mainstream domination. When the track was released in 1982, it hit number one spots worldwide and sat at the top of the charts for weeks. It was his biggest success to date, and the team behind the song knew it would be. Nile Rodgers, the track’s producer, said, “The song was going to be a major hit. And we knew it.”
But that seemed to be what Bowie wanted as he leaned into this more commercial side of himself. “I went mainstream in a major way with the song ‘Let’s Dance.’ I pandered to that in my next few albums,” he said. However, he quickly found out how limiting that would feel.
“What I found I had done was put a box around myself,” he admitted. After years of trying on different characters and constantly evolving, he found that suddenly, people’s perception of him was stuck. “It was very hard for people to see me as anything other than the person in the suit who did ‘Let’s Dance’”, he said.
It was draining to suddenly be trapped in one place after a career of constant swifts and switch-ups. “It was driving me mad because it took all my passion for experimenting away,” he said.
But in the end, he had to return to his true spirit of experimentation and evolution. That was the artistic ethos he was built on. He laid out his manifesto to the magazine when he said, “Creating something is the one area where you mustn’t have caution or inhibition. If you make a startling, disastrous mess, it’s fine, because you can reach out and reevaluate and plunge off into another direction. But never be scared to do the plunging.” So after shaking off the shackles of ‘Let’s Dance’, Bowie went plunging again.
