David Bowie
Let's Dance

THE REVIEW

Scene 1

Country farmhouse, Sunday afternoon of a sunny and hot June. You're in bed with your significant other, who, as usual, knows how to bring you to states of excitement that reach the sublime. The sheets start to get warm and damp with the games. The taste of everything is what you know well, giving you security and certainty, the kind that won't induce performance anxiety. Suddenly, she gets up, opens the drawer of the dresser, and pulls out a strange leather harness from which a tool emerges that should be on your side, not hers. You widen your eyes, look at her, look at the object, and think that she is always her, what she is proposing is still sex, but you are convinced and traditional enough to think that you probably won't like it much, but will you still take this leap with her?

Scene 2

Record store, you take from the shelf the latest effort of your favorite artist. Persistent rumors suggested this work was remarkably different from what you were accustomed to. You look at it, turn it around, reading the titles, looking at the images and thinking it will be a leap into the void, but will you still take this leap with him?

Changes are there, and understandably so; as such, they can be accepted or immediately rejected, or appreciated over time, even if they turn out to be huge. So I took the leap, the second one, and bought this "Let's Dance" in its time.

In short, Bowie didn’t need more rhythm than he already had, he didn’t need more pop than he already had, he didn’t need more fame, he didn’t need more money (or maybe he did). What really prompted the White Duke to change his face once again and embark on this pop dance adventure? Who knows! He always said: "If something works, throw it away!" It’s in his nature not to remain stuck in things: change has always been his primary goal.

So back then, we found ourselves with a fresh vinyl, spontaneous, full of vibrant ideas that aimed to surprise the listener, but also and especially to prepare the ground for a mega live tour and to demonstrate how those pieces had their explosive force in concert.

Did it succeed? I saw him at the Frejus arena in France that same summer. Nice concert indeed. Bowie still had an impressive vocal pull and Carlos Alomar maintaining a musical (almost orchestral) volume that was breathtaking. But the album? Beautiful feelings, but only to a certain extent. Beautiful songs but already short-lived in prospect. And with all the crackling content that ends up being essentially an outer veneer that time, inexorably, erases. In fact, it has erased it. And, when all is said and done, from this Bowie and this handful of beautiful songs, a bit of bitterness remains and a series of tracks there to be appreciated by young people approaching Bowie for the first time. For those of us who saw him grow by our side, dazzling us with a goosebump-inducing Berlin trilogy, what remains? Only the vinyl remains because we didn’t buy the CD.

So, going back to the initial paraphrase, we would have done well to leave the equipment in the drawer, and make love in a traditional way.