"Let's Dance" is a song by the English singer-songwriter David Bowie, originally included as the title track of his 1983 album of the same name. Co-produced by Nile Rodgers of Chic, it was recorded in late 1982 at the Power Station in New York City. With the assistance of engineer Bob Clearmountain, Rodgers transformed the song from its folk rock origins to a dance number through studio effects and new musicians Bowie had yet to work with. Bowie hired then-unknown Texas guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, who added a blues edge.
Embracing rock, funk, dance, new wave and post-disco, the full-length seven-minute track features numerous solos, including trumpet, saxophone, guitar and percussion. Several music elements, from the bassline and the breakdown, were based on Rodgers' work with Chic, while the rising vocal intros were taken from the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout". The lyrics describe a couple dancing under the moonlight and possess a sense of peril and ominousness.
Released as the album's lead single in full-length and edited formats, "Let's Dance" became the biggest-selling single of Bowie's career, topping the charts in numerous countries, including the UK and the US. The song's music video, filmed in Australia, provided commentary on the treatment of Aboriginal Australians, using the red shoes from a line to symbolise their abuse. Bowie performed the song throughout the 1980s and early 2000s during his concert tours.
Viewed as one of Bowie's most popular songs, the song has received praise for its catchiness, accessibility, commerciality and production, and has appeared on lists of his best songs. "Let's Dance" has been covered, sampled, remixed and performed by other artists, and has made appearances in films, video games and television commercials.
Background and development
In 1982, David Bowie left his longtime label RCA Records, having grown increasingly unsatisfied with them, and signed a new contract with EMI for a reported $17 million. With a new label and an idea for a commercial sound, he wanted to start fresh with a new producer. Around autumn, Bowie met Nile Rodgers of the American band Chic in the after-hours New York nightclub Continental, where the two developed a rapport over industry acquaintances and shared musical interests; he eventually asked him to produce his next record. Rodgers initially thought Bowie desired to continue making art rock records—a follow-up to 1980's Scary Monsters—until the artist informed him, "I want you to make hits."
In late 1982, the duo regrouped at Bowie's home in Montreux, Switzerland. Bowie, using a 12-string acoustic guitar that had only six strings, played for him a folk-like number he believed could be a hit with the right arrangement, tentatively calling it "Let's Dance". Dismissing the number as sounding "like Donovan meets Anthony Newley", Rodgers recalled: "I was like, 'that's not happening, man'. It totally threw me. It was not a song you could dance to." Nevertheless, Rodgers adjusted the arrangement, moving it higher in the scale, switching the key up to B, inverting the chords and adding upstrokes.
Demo Bowie and Rodgers recorded a demo of "Let's Dance" at Montreux's Mountain Studios with a group of musicians, among them the Turkish musician Erdal Kızılçay on bass. Kızılçay's work at first followed the stylings of the jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius, but he and Rodgers ultimately worked out a simpler bassline for the song. The biographer Chris O'Leary describes the demo's sound as "basically Bowie singing over a Chic demo". In 2018, Rodgers stated: "This [demo] recording was the first indication of what we could do together as I took his 'folk song' and arranged it into something that the entire world would soon be dancing to and seemingly has not stopped dancing to for the last 35 years! It became the blueprint not only for 'Let's Dance' the song but for the entire album as well." The same year, an edited version of the demo, mixed by Rodgers, was released digitally on 8 January, and the full-length 7:34 demo was released as a 12" vinyl single on 21 April for Record Store Day.
Recording "Let's Dance" was the first song recorded for the album. The sessions, co-produced by Bowie and Rodgers, took place at the Power Station in New York City during the first three weeks of December 1982. Engineered by Bob Clearmountain, the song was completed in one or two takes and set the tone for the rest of the project. The rest of the album was recorded quickly, completed in just 17 days.
Along with a new producer, Bowie hired an entirely new set of musicians for the sessions, as he "wanted to try people that I'd never worked with before, so that I couldn't predict how they were going to play". Rodgers replaced Bowie's regular Carlos Alomar on rhythm guitar and recruited his Chic collaborators: Robert Sabino (keyboards), Sammy Figueroa (percussion) and Frank and George Simms (backing vocals). Also hired were Omar Hakim (drums), Carmine Rojas (bass), Mac Gollehon (trumpet), David Spinner (vocals) and Stan Harrison, Robert Aaron and Steve Elson (saxophones). Bowie did not play any instruments, stating at the time: "I don't play a damned thing. This was a singer's album!" He recorded his vocals in two days.
Rodgers had the guitar parts treated with delays by Clearmountain and separated into groups of notes, punctuated by the bassline. Blending Rojas' Fender bass with Sabino's bass synthesiser as a way to "expand the dynamic range", Rodgers later said: "David threw in little elements like that and gave it that edge and excitement that I probably wouldn't have thought of." Hakim's snare drum was treated with gated reverb, a sound developed by engineers like Clearmountain and Hugh Padgham at the Power Station and London's Townhouse Studios, respectively, wherein a microphone would be hooked up on the snare head to record the initial impact and rig ambient microphones equipped with noise gates above the kit for extra reverb. Rodgers also added processed rhythm guitar tracks on top of the saxophone and trumpet lines: "It sounds almost unnaturally tight. The attacks come from out of nowhere. There's no pre-attack breathing. The horns just come in, 'pop pop', and then decay out fast." Rojas later stressed the importance of Clearmountain's role in the production: "Bob, as an engineer, really captured what we were doing live in the room. He gets very little credit historically, but take it from me, he was vital to that record."
Contributing additional guitar overdubs towards the end of the sessions was Stevie Ray Vaughan, a then-unknown 28-year-old Texas blues guitarist, whom Bowie hired after seeing him play at the 1982 Montreux Jazz Festival. Bowie praised his guitar playing, saying: "He's got a whole other thing going on." He used a Fender Stratocaster plugged into an old Fender amplifier; the author Paul Trynka commented that "all tone [came] from the player". "Let's Dance" was the first song Bowie and Rodgers played for Vaughan. The latter recalled: "[Vaughan] could sense this group of anonymous musicians were about to make history."
Composition Over seven minutes in length, O'Leary states that "Let's Dance" consists of a series of "set pieces", featuring individual solos by trumpet, guitar, percussion and saxophone. The track's verses and refrains are merged, with the bridge acting "as another refrain". The title comes from Chris Montez's 1962 song of the same name that Bowie had played with his first band the Kon-rads.
Music Speaking in 2014, Rodgers explained: "[Bowie] wanted me to make a record that sounded like the future, but still sounded like the essence of rock 'n' roll and R&B, but would be timeless." Bowie, who labelled the song "a postmodern homage to the Isley Brothers' 'Twist and Shout, cited Rodgers as the reason for its "incredible commercial appeal". Mirroring the popular dance music of the day, the author James E. Perone says the song was aimed at the audience that ignored Bowie's prior musical and lyrical experiments. O'Leary describes the song as "a sampler of American music" and "a catalog in jump-cuts", displaying the likes of electric blues, funk, Hollywood jazz, R&B, rock 'n' roll [and] Latin". Other commentators have categorised the song as funk, new wave, dance-rock, post-disco, dance-pop and funk rock.
The song begins with a rising vocal intro, which Bowie had Rodgers add as a way to hook audiences in immediately. Taken from the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout" (1963), drums, bass, trumpet, saxophone and vocals converge and explode into a cadence. Similarly styled crescendos occur towards the end of the refrains, where Bowie moves up the scale – "if you should fall... into my arms" – before peaking on "trem-ble-like-a-flowwwww-er!" According to O'Leary, the bridge is a "melodic steal" from the Beatles' "She Loves You" (1963). The song's breakdown mimics Chic, where the instruments strip one by one to bass and drums before building back up again. Rodgers later explained to the biographer David Buckley: "On a song like Chic's 'Good Times' , the most important part was the breakdown. Whenever the band would go to the breakdown the audience would scream." O'Leary compares the dueling saxophone break to the World Saxophone Quartet rather than a contemporary R&B horn section.
Instrumentally, the final bassline, which the biographer Nicholas Pegg considers "pure Chic", features two interspersing hooks of "a four-note stepwise descent and a five-note pattern that falls a step or holds the same note". The drum track utilises an elaborate kick drum pattern that repeats every eight bars, while the brass riffs–heard directly after "dance the blues"–were lifted from Henry Mancini's Peter Gunn soundtrack (1959). Rodgers said "that [riff] seemed to me so anti-groove, but sticking it on something that was so hard groove[...] it was magic!" O'Leary compares Figueroa's woodblocks to sounding like "mechanical rattlesnakes" and notes the isolated vocal tracks sound like they were "recorded in a canyon". Vaughan, using Albert King as inspiration, adds a blues-inflected edge to the overall dance groove. Discussing the track at the time, Bowie said: "It's got a hard cut, very high on treble – it sears through."
Lyrics
Pegg writes that the song "maintains a gravity absent from the rest of the album by virtue of its surprising bleakness". Containing an enigmatic sense of peril, the narrator invites his partner to dance, portrayed as a type of ceremonial engagement. Rather than dancing under a "lovers' moon", the two dance "under the moonlight"—a "serious moonlight". Although Bowie told an interviewer at the time the phrase was meaningless, Rodgers felt the "serious moonlight" was indebted to him, telling Buckley that he "used to say 'serious' all the time". Pegg finds a possible inspiration to be Aleister Crowley's 1923 composition "Lyric of Love to Leah", which features lines related to dancing in the moonlight with a lover. Perone interprets the use of "serious" as representing a "critical juncture" of the relationship. Additionally, the future is portrayed as empty and the only remedy is to dance "for fear tonight is all". O'Leary deems the lyrics "fragile, regretful and ominous".
The narrator also instructs his lover to "put on your red shoes and dance", which O'Leary likens to the medieval St. Vitus' dance and the 1948 film The Red Shoes. The artist Tanja Stark also argued the phrase recalls Hans Christian Andersen's tale "The Red Shoes", in which a little girl is vainly tempted to wear red shoes only to find they could not be removed, separating her from God's grace: "Let's dance / for fear your grace should fall."
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