Bowie's Best
Written: Jun 07 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The songs basically, especially the stunning title track.
Cons: Nothing can live up to the height that title track after it.
The Bottom Line: One of the finest albums to come out of the 1980s and certainly the high point of David Bowie's otherwise so-so career.
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| taylor-mayed's Full Review: Let's Dance [Remaster] by David Bowie |
The career of David Bowie is an intriguing and sometimes frustrating enigma. Here is a talented musician, capable of producing classic, well-known songs such as “Space Oddity”, “Starman”, “Changes”, “Heroes”, “Ashes to Ashes” and so on. And yet here also is a man who has written some of the most tedious, pretentious and over-rated ‘popular’ music ever to be recorded, with albums such as “Aladdin Sane” so self-involved as to be virtually unlistenable for all but the most dedicated of Bowie fans.
However, in 1983, David Bowie released an album that for once in his career cast aside the pretentious poor-man’s Bob Dylan and gave us an array of crowd-pleasing, excellently-produced pop songs that rank with some of the finest ever recorded. Significantly, he did not do this alone, but it was instead the blistering array of talent assembled for “Let’s Dance” that really made it what it was.
Certainly, Bowie had the song writing ability which is of course the core strength of the album. But to back him up he had the production work of former Chic member Nile Rodgers, the blistering guitar work of Stevie Ray Vaughan – a musician discovered by Bowie whose career really took off after his work on this album – and also the electronic production wizardry of the King of eighties synth-pop, Georgio Moroder.
All of this unquestionably brought Bowie kicking and screaming into mainstream popular music for possibly the first time in his career, a process that had started with such songs as “Ashes to Ashes” and “Under Pressure” earlier in the decade and was firmly cemented with this album.
It begins with the crunching guitar of “Modern Love”, a cynical look at the emotion that claims not to believe in its existence. The production of this song has not dated at all, it sounds as fresh and relevant today as it did in 1983, and as with all of the album Rodgers’ production provides a strong, thumping rhythm that really drives the song along with the force of an express train. Bowie’s terse but emotional delivery of the lyric also adds a great deal to this song, and all of the songs here show just how much Bowie’s voice – never the greatest in musical history – improved from his earlier work and how it really reached its peak at this point, much like his career.
The second track, “China Girl”, was written with Bowie’s close friend Iggy Pop, and originally on one of Pop’s albums a few years beforehand. The way in which Rodgers has produced the song lends it a genuine oriental feel, mixing this with the more Western pop influences to create a unique sound, rather than allowing the Eastern influence to dominate which would have seemed jarringly out of place on this album.
“China Girl” again contains a powerful rhythm section, with the bass and drums being prominent on this track as they are throughout the entire album. This is augmented with some blistering guitar work by Vaughan, and Bowie’s vocal shines through clearly and concisely throughout all of this powerful backing track.
Then of course we come to track three. Not just the high point of the album, not just the high point of Bowie’s career, certainly one of the very best songs to emerge from the 1980s, but quite possibly one of the finest pop songs ever written. I speak, of course, of the album’s title track, “Let’s Dance”, a song that justifies Bowie’s place in musical history on its own.
The pounding rhythm of the track makes those of the first two songs seem quiet and understated by comparison, inviting the listener to do just as the title suggests. The Bowie vocal at the very beginning is reminiscent of The Beatles’ “Twist and Shout”, with the building ‘aahhh’ sounds sending us soaring into the song proper.
Once there, we are first given a funky dance track, perhaps to be expected from a song produced by a former member of Chic, which suddenly and unexpectedly turns its hand to powerful rock balladry with the chorus, “if you say run, I’ll run with you,” et cetera – an ode to unconditional love, in stark contrast to the first track on the album.
The drum and bass are of course at the heart of the song, but they are again strengthened by Vaughan’s guitar solo and the horn arrangements, which held the song to build up to musical crescendos at some points before falling back to the simple but effective main rhythm. Throughout, Bowie’s lead vocal as the equal and probably better of anything else he ever sung, pushing his somewhat limited singing abilities to their heights and for once not finding them lacking. A true classic of the modern era, and one that hasn’t dated nearly so much as its eighties contemporaries – indeed, this can be said to be true for the entire album.
“Without You” suffers from immediately following “Let’s Dance” and of course it cann’t hope to live up to that tracks – but Bowie could have placed all his greatest hits on the album right after “Let’s Dance” and it still would have been a disappointment. I suspect that “Without You” tends to get forgotten or underrated for this reason, but it is actually a very good song, yet again infused with that funky rhythm running right the way through the album. It tells of a love that saves, again contrasting with the tone of the album as it began, and is possibly the most uplifting and optimistic track on the album.
“Ricochet” is a very interesting song with a slightly disturbed, haunting vocal performance from Bowie that lends the song a kind of other-worldly quality. It seems to be a song about unemployment and being forgotten, and it’s tempting to say that if Bob Dylan had ever been inclined to go into dance music, the results would have been similar to this.
The following song, “Criminal World”, is the only one on the album that Bowie did not write or co-write himself, but the production work makes it fit. The guitar work on this track from Vaughan is probably his best on the whole album, his plucking of strings through the whole song giving the track an edgy quality that is added to by Bowie’s half-hushed vocal.
“Cat People” sees Bowie writing with Georgio Moroder, as everyone and their brother seemed to at some point during the 1980s. The results here are nowhere near as impressive as Moroder’s collaborations with Phil Oakley or Freddie Mercury. This is probably the only instance on this album of the powerful instrumentation obscuring Bowie’s vocal, apart from on the chorus where he really raises his voice to powerful levels. A stunning guitar solo from Vaughan that adds real electricity to the track saves it from being average and raises it to the merely good, which on an album like “Let’s Dance” still seems average.
The album ends with probably its least distinctive track, “Shake It”, which has certainly dated more than the others and is rather a disappointing conclusion to such a great work. Perhaps it would have been a better idea to save “Let’s Dance” until the end of the album so that it would not so completely overshadow all that follows it and would end the album on a high of stratosphere proportions.
“Let’s Dance” is, to sum up, the defining moment of Bowie’s career, when he proved that he could be more than a self-involved, obscure crooner whose career ended with the seventies. Here he showed the world, with a little help from his friends, that he could play the mainstream’s game when he wanted to and play it better than many of the regulars.
If Bowie had done this sort of thing throughout his entire career, he might perhaps be on the same level as The Beatles or Queen or Dylan and all of the other first-rank of musicians. He isn’t, but the fact that he produced such a fantastic work at least once in his career is something to be thankful for.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
taylor-mayed
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Location: England
Reviews written: 27
Trusted by: 8 members
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