This Serious Moonlight: David Bowie’s Let’s Dance at 40
Looking back on the Duke’s biggest pop hit
“Put on your red shoes and dance the blues.”
For those of us of a certain age, those nine words are all it takes. We hear David Bowie’s cracking voice. We see him leaning against the wall in a bar as a young Australian aboriginal couple dances. We hear the now-unmistakable sound of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitar (yes, that’s SRV on this record!).
“To the song they’re playing on the radio.”
VIDEO: David Bowie “Let’s Dance”
And oh boy, was “Let’s Dance” played on the radio and MTV in the heaviest of heavy rotation when it was released 40 years ago today. It was a monster of a monster hit, peaking at number one in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Finland, Ireland and Switzerland. It reached number one on the Eurochart Hot 100 and number two in Australia, South Africa, Germany, France and Austria.
While Bowie wasn’t new to the number-one spot in the U.S. — “Fame” in 1975, “Ashes to Ashes” in 1980, and “Under Pressure” with Queen in 1981 all topped the charts — it was far and away the most commercially successful record he ever had, catapulting him into a level of global fame that few stars ever achieve.
“When we set out to do that project, he actually told me he wanted to make a commercial record,” producer, composer and Chic co-founder Nile Rodgers told Yahoo! Entertainment in 2016, “which I thought was bizarre, because I never thought of David Bowie as making commercial records. That’s why I would call him the Picasso of Rock ’N’ Roll: Because for him, making a commercial record was almost like an art project. It wasn’t to get it to sell millions; it was almost like he wanted to make a commercial record just so he could feel what it felt like to do that.”
“China Girl” and “Modern Love” also became radio and MTV hits, though neither replicated the massive success of “Let’s Dance.” Still, they helped catapult Bowie’s 15th studio album to platinum status in the U.S., U.K., France, Australia, the Netherlands and New Zealand, and 5x platinum in Canada – totaling sales of about 11 million worldwide.
“That record, the amount of units we sold, was staggering,” Rodgers said “I’ve listened to him talk about it, and it really was uncomfortable for him, because it put him in a world that even he had never experienced before. And I get it. You go from being a very eclectic, avant-garde artist that people had tons of respect for, where you’re speaking to people on a higher level and… I don’t mean to sound elitist, but the appreciation of David Bowie’s music prior to Let’s Dance presupposes a certain amount of sophistication on behalf of the listener. He was very, very on the cutting edge.”
That’s the flipside of massive success, of course: While Let’s Dance introduced rock’s greatest chameleon to a whole new audience who pretty much ignored Ziggy Stardust, Diamond Dogs, Low, Hunky Dory, Station to Station. Heroes, Aladdin Sane (sheesh, how the hell could so many people have ignored so many great albums?!), listeners who paid attention to what Bowie was up to, who knew that “this ain’t rock and roll, this is genocide,” had the general feeling that Bowie sold out.
“He said to me at one session in the early ’90s that he needed to get back to his essence.,” longtime Bowie pianist Mike Garson told U.K.’s Daily Express in 2021. “‘Let’s Dance’ was such a big hit, it threw him and he lost his center. For an artist like David, that was very disturbing.”
Which is not to say that Bowie doesn’t stay in touch with his non-megastar self on some of the album’s deeper tracks. The driving, percussive “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” was a remake of Bowie’s theme song for the 1982 erotic horror flick, Cat People. “Without You,” a slice of understated pop, would have fit in well on one of Bowie’s earliest releases. And “Ricochet,” which opens side two, has a ‘70s-Bowie experimental feel about it, perhaps so much so that it doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the album.
Bowie’s next two studio albums, Tonight in 1984 and Never Let Me Down in 1987, were poorly received and today are ranked among the worst of Bowie’s catalog. He regained some of his mojo in 1989 with Tin Machine, then came back to solo work with 1993’s Black Tie White Noise, an electronics-heavy record also produced by Rodgers. It was hailed by many as Bowie’s comeback album and got generally favorable reviews, but in retrospect it’s also typically ranked among Bowie’s worst studio albums, as you can see for example here and here.
Ah, but Let’s Dance. The album has aged well, the three monster hits still sound fresh, and if the record successfully introduced his exceptional 1970s work to people who otherwise might have ignored it, then all the better.
“(Let’s sway) under the moonlight, this serious moonlight.”
Just reading those words, I bet you can hear his voice, too.
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