NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO (Let's Dance - David Bowie)

Member Name: thehud

Product:	Let's Dance - David Bowie
Date:	03/03/03 (311 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None whatsoever

Disadvantages: Everything

BOREDOM, BOREDOM, BER-DUM BER-DUMMMM!!!!

Oh hum, here we go now.

Let's dance put on your red shoes and dance the blues
Let's dance to the song they're playin' on the radio
Let's sway while colour lights up your face
Let's sway sway through the crowd to an empty space

Yeah, okay so far, just about, let's see what else he can come up with.

If you say run, I'll run with you
If you say hide, we'll hide
Because my love for you
Would break my heart in two
If you should fall
Into my arms
And tremble like a flower

Ermmm, tremble like a flower? That's a bit worrying. I'm not sure this is going to work out too well.

Let's dance for fear your grace should fall
Let's dance for fear tonight is all
Let's sway you could look into my eyes
Let's sway under the moonlight, this serious moonlight

No, I?m sorry, that?s quite quite enough, I can take no more, this is not acceptable.

Rolling Stone - Ranked #83 in Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Albums Of The 80s" Survey. Q Magazine (1/96, p.146) - 3 Stars - Good - "...a splendid comeback, all romance, funk, [and] Stevie Ray Vaughn..."

Yeah, well, what the hell do they know?

When David Bowie finally saw off his uneasy relationship with the RCA label and embarked to a supposed new challenge with EMI in the early 1980?s, it may have promised a brave new era, but the early evidence wasn't very encouraging at all. The title track was an enormous hit single and you were tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt, despite his sparkling new haircut, crappy clothes and lovely complexion. After all, this was the genius (I'll remind you of that one again, no doubt) who brought us Low and Heroes and Stationtostation and Ziggy Stardust and a million other glam rock wet dreams. Surely, he was taking the piss with Let'
s Dance, and it was just a dim parody, created with his tongue stuck so far into his cheek it was poking out of his ear.

But no, look he's issued a second single, and it's even worse. China Girl, complete with glossy video where you can see Mr Skinny's buttocks in a take off of From Here To Eternity. He's bloody serious, he's actually sold out at his age.

Well, the good news is that he hadn't and although Let's Dance was a total mistake and he went seriously off beam with the misguided democracy of Tin Machine he eventually came to his senses and got back onside, but believe me there was serious evidence that Mr Bowie had lost it when he released the abysmal Let's Dance album. It was the direst record he had ever created and what made it all the more worrying was the wholesome grin and tan with which he presented it to the world.

Co-producing with Nile Rogers of Chic and enlisting Rogers and his colleague Bernard Edwards as key members of his backing band, Bowie opted for his comeback for a sheeny dance pop sound which surely Chic would have been appalled to be associated with.

For the record, the tracks were:
Modern Love
China Girl
Let's Dance
Without You
Ricochet
Criminal World
Cat People (Putting Out Fire)
Shake It

Personnel: David Bowie (vocals); Stevie Ray Vaughan, Nile Rodgers (guitar); Robert Aaron, Stan Harrison (flute, tenor saxophone); Steve Elson (flute, baritone saxophone); Mac Gollehon (trumpet); Rob Sabino (keyboards); Carmine Rojas, Bernard Edwards (bass); Omar Hakim, Tony Thompson (drums); Sammy Figueroa (percussion)


This record was very, very shiny, commercial, optimistic, uptempo, listenable and accessible. At the same time it was bland, soulless, empty, vacuous, docile and smug, an arrogant insult to a fan base which Bowie had built up over the years with a distinctive, individual sound and image. Now, it could have b
een any bland mid-western act churning out this pap. No sorry, if it had have been it would never have so much as sniffed the skid marks of the charts, for this was bloody dire.

No mere words could describe exactly how low the Thin White One had sunk in his descent to becoming the Healthy Tanned One, perfect teeth and bleached blonde hair belying his former roots. China Girl and Modern Love were pleasant enough chart fare, it was just that they were so dismally, dismally disappointing, as if their creator had decided to abandon the obscure and the strange in favour of Moon In June rhymes and mentality. Bowie had often been accused of being concerned more with form at the expense of substance but now he seemed to have settled on the Mighty Dollar and a chart placing at the expense of form, substance AND all taste. It was certainly a shock to the system for those of us who had been reared on Five Years and Life On Mars? and Jean Genie. If the Brotherhood of Man had dreamed of becoming a solo act, then they could have happily squeezed into the pants and braces that Bowie dsiplayed in his promotional interviews for Let's Dance.

Scary Monsters and Super Creeps had been a bit of an odd album, sure enough, but it was still the Bowie of old, hidden away in there, creating intriguing parodies of his former material. Now all he could manage was the pastiche of a very poor and disgraced chart idol.

The King Is Dead, Long live the Shiny One

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