Rolling Stone
Let's Dance
David Bowie
Rating: ****
BY Ken Tucker | June 17, 1997
As a pop-culture changeling flitting from pose to pose, David Bowie is overrated. Ultimately, there isn't that much difference between Ziggy Stardust and the Elephant Man — they're both ugly misfits who want to control their worlds. However, as a pop musician, endlessly experimenting and exhausting new styles, Bowie is unduly neglected. He has been consistently astute in his choice of collaborators, from Mick Ronson to Brian Eno. And now, the Thin White Duke has teamed up with a master of black rock, Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers, for an album of chilly dance music.
Let's Dance sounds great; it's all beat, brains and breathiness. The album's most intelligent strategy is its utter simplicity: Rodgers serves up guitar lines in thick slabs, and Bowie's voice cuts across their surface like a knife slicing meat. His mannered whine is alluringly distant — charming but formal, inveigling but austere. This is as true of a song like the loud, slamming "Modern Love" as it is of the quiet, pulsing "Without You."
Working as coproducers, Bowie and Rodgers have updated each other's sound. Although Bowie revitalized his career in 1975 by ripping off a James Brown riff for the hit single "Fame," Chic's brand of black rock & roll is more suitable for him. The icy sheen of aloofness that glistens on Chic's greatest hits ("Good Times," "Le Freak") is a lacquer that coats Bowie's whole career, from "Space Oddity" through the fractured, mysterious LP, Lodger. Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards formed Chic at the height of discomania, and while Chic's work remains interesting and vital, the duo's career has not: their last two albums have stalled on the charts, and their remake/remodel of Deborah Harry on Koo Koo was a disaster.
For his part, Bowie hasn't been heard from much since 1980. Scary Monsters was a good album, but it was also a dead end, concluding the themes of dislocation and alienation developed on Low, "Heroes" and Lodger. By superstar standards, it was only a modest commercial success, and its pervasive feelings of dread and sadness were oppressive. If Bowie has become this much of a downer, his audience seemed to say, give us Gary Numan.
But now Bowie and Rodgers are back, and the title song of Let's Dance is a jittery, bopping single as vital as anything on the radio. It's also relevant to add that Gary Numan is a has-been: there's a difference between following trends and running them into the ground, after all.
The trend Bowie and Rodgers are following is Eighties-style dance music. Let's Dance is synth-pop without the synths — or, at least, without their domination. Although Rob Sabino adds splashes of keyboards, Rodgers' guitar does the work that synthesizers usually do these days, providing the foot-tapping hooks and an aura of cool.
For all its surface beauty, though, there's something thin and niggling about Let's Dance. Perhaps it's Bowie's choice of material, some of which is recycled: "China Girl," cowritten by Iggy Pop, appeared on Pop's 1977 LP, The Idiot; "Criminal World" was recorded by Metro; and "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" is a rerecording of Bowie and Giorgio Moroder's theme song for Paul Schrader's Cat People film. Subtract these three tunes — and they are certainly the most subtractable songs on the album — and you're left with five songs. Of these, "Ricochet" borrows the tape trickery, anonymous voices and rhythms of Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, while "Let's Dance" refurbishes the hook of Chic's "Good Times."
That leaves three pristine lovelies, and I'm tempted to employ a reviewer's cliché and say they're worth the price of the album. I'll resist, however, for it is only in the context of the whole record that "Modern Love," "Without You" and "Shake It" take on their most dramatic effects. This trio of songs offers some of the most daring songwriting of Bowie's career. The lyrics are so simple they risk simple-mindedness, yet I'd give a hundred "Space Oddity"s for the elegant cliché twisting at the climax of "Modern Love": "Modern love gets me to the church on time/Church-on-time terrifies me." As a rock statement about growing up and facing commitments, that couplet beats the hell out of Jackson Browne.
"Without You" and "Shake It" are two of a kind: the former features the most exquisitely unaffected vocal performance Bowie has yet attempted, while the latter adds wit to candor. Quite aside from a verse about Manhattan that should make cabaret writers Kander and Ebb squirm with jealousy ("I could take you to heaven/I could spin you to hell/But I'll take you to New York/It's the place that I ??now well"), "Shake It" is Bowie's most triumphant stab at deflating the portentous persona of David Bowie Superstar. Having spent a career donning masks, acting existentially neurotic and pushing his latest image, Bowie lets his voice slip demurely behind the lurching beat and a squealing backup chorus, only to suddenly surge forward and deliver the lines that end the album: "When I'm feeling disconnected, well, I sure know what to do/Shake it, baby."
It's a great, giddy moment: David Bowie cuts a rug, and cuts the crap. Love is the answer, get down and boogie. Let's dance, indeed.
BBC Online
David Bowie Let’s Dance Review
Album Released: 1983.
The album that set the template for 1980s Bowie, for better and worse.
David Quantick 2011
It’s hard to imagine now how people felt when, in 1983, Let’s Dance emerged as if from nowhere. The general pop-buying public, at least, loved it – there are very few records shinier than this one, which glints like David Bowie’s new teeth and is full of treble and echoes like a robber’s cave.
Bowie’s choice of Nile Rodgers for producer was canny; Rodgers had moved away from the sophisticated disco of Chic and was becoming the person cool rock acts from Debbie Harry to Duran Duran would hire to give them a sheen of funk, rock and pop. Certainly nobody but Rodgers could have taken a song like China Girl (written by Bowie and Iggy Pop and originally recorded by the latter), with its paranoid references to "visions of swastikas", and turned it into a sweet, romantic hit single. And the combination of Bowie and Rodgers on the title track was perfect – Bowie’s epic lyric about dancing under "serious moonlight" (the name of his subsequent monster tour, which lasted until December and took in 96 shows) and the brilliant filching of the crescendo "ahh!"s from The Beatles’ version of The Isley Brothers’ Twist and Shout were masterstrokes, each welded to a loud, stadium-ised drum and bass sound.
But older Bowie fans were less impressed. The last three years had seen Bowie mooch between soundtracks (his theme for Cat People is reprised here), one-offs and a jumble of often-great records that had little or nothing do with his excellent 1980 album, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). Let’s Dance may have had a ground-breaking sound and a popularity that Bowie clearly ached for, but it’s often a mundane album, as songs like Ricochet and Shake It mark time until a single turns up. (It’s possibly significant that one of the best songs here is Criminal World, a cover of a song by obscure Bowie clones Metro).
But when Bowie growled, on another of the album’s excellent singles Modern Love, "I know when to go out / And when to stay in / And get things done," he wasn’t kidding. Let’s Dance was literally the template for 80s Bowie – blonde, suited and smiling. It would, however, be a long time before he made another single as striking as Let’s Dance.
The Guardian
Old music: David Bowie – Let's Dance
David Bowie's return in 1983 was an anticlimax to some, but to no means all
To say David Bowie's return in 1983 was eagerly awaited would be an understatement. Bowie had been one of pop's dominant figures in the 70s, his astonishing shape-shifting ensuring he remained ahead of the cultural curve. And in the three years since his last album, 1980's Scary Monsters, his central place in the pop firmament had been cemented, with post-punks and new romantics citing him as a key influence.
Given the stratospheric levels of anticipation, it was perhaps inevitable that many fans found Let's Dance a disappointment. The alien artist formerly known as Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane had assumed no new identity, donned no new mask. His 1983 incarnation was prosaic: a grinning, besuited, bleach-blond rock star. He looked tanned and healthy, years younger than the emaciated, cocaine-addled Thin White Duke. In interviews he joked and appeared relaxed. There was nothing to frighten the horses. Bowie had become accessible. Where was the mystery?
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But I wasn't disappointed. I'd discovered Bowie after Scary Monsters and found Let's Dance thrilling. I was 18, and loved the idealised romance in the lyric – and the reference to the song of the same name by Chris Montez, a hit when Bowie was a similar age. And I found the marriage of Carlos Alomar's blues guitar to Chic's classy disco exhilarating.
Co-produced with Chic's Nile Rodgers, Let's Dance had a huge sound, as wide and expansive as the multiple zeros on its maker's bank account, a sheen as glossy as the magazine covers he adorned. True, Let's Dance signalled a parting of ways with the zeitgeist – but Bowie hadn't quite finished with it yet. The commercial success of Let's Dance and the album of the same title (featuring the follow-up hit singles China Girl and Modern Love) dominated the airwaves in the long-hot summer of 1983. Like the best pop records, it was the perfect snapshot of the time.
Robert Christgau
Let's Dance [EMI America, 1983]
Anyone who wants Dave's $17 million fling to flop doesn't understand how little good motives have to do with good rock and roll. Rodgers & Bowie are a rich combo in the ways that count as well as the ways that don't, and this stays up throughout, though it's perfunctory professional surface does make one wonder whether Bowie-the-thespian really cares much about pop music these days. "Modern Love" is the only interesting new song, the remakes are pleasantly pointless, and rarely has such a lithe rhythm player been harnessed to such a flat groove. Which don't mean the world won't dance to it. B
AllMusic
David Bowie
Let's Dance
AllMusic Rating ***
Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
After summing up his maverick tendencies on Scary Monsters, David Bowie aimed for the mainstream with Let's Dance. Hiring Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers as a co-producer, Bowie created a stylish, synthesized post-disco dance music that was equally informed by classic soul and the emerging new romantic subgenre of new wave, which was ironically heavily inspired by Bowie himself. Let's Dance comes tearing out of the gate, propulsed by the skittering "Modern Love," the seductively menacing "China Girl," and the brittle funk of the title track. All three songs became international hits, and for good reason -- they're catchy, accessible pop songs that have just enough of an alien edge to make them distinctive. However, that careful balance is quickly thrown off by a succession of pleasant but unremarkable plastic soul workouts. "Cat People" and a cover of Metro's "Criminal World" are relatively strong songs, but the remainder of the album indicates that Bowie was entering a songwriting slump. However, the three hits were enough to make the album a massive hit, and their power hasn't diminished over the years, even if the rest of the record sounds like an artifact.
Amazom.com
David Bowie returned to recording after a four-year break with this relatively clean-cut 1983 album. Although offering another definite new direction for Bowie, with Nile Rodgers of Chic helping to produce a stylish post-disco dance sound, Let's Dance is a mixed bag. Much of the album's success was due to its three danceable hit singles--"China Girl," a sensuous Bowie/Iggy Pop collaboration, the distinctive "Modern Love," and the funky title track. However, much of the rest of the album is bland and vapid, marking the start of serious decline in Bowie's songwriting skills. A cover of Metro's "Criminal World" and "Cat People" are the only other strong tracks here. --James Swift