Let's talk about Let's Dance

This was my first-ever Bowie record,
bought (used) sometime around 1988
(It came with the sticker already on it.)

Talk to any die-hard David Bowie fan and they'll never tell you that their favorite album is Let's Dance. It probably won't even make their top 5. Let's Dance considered Bowie's commercial concession and, even though it was his most successful (hits and income-wise), saying you like it feels lame. Lame in the same vein as people in the mid-1980s who still considered themselves fans of disco.

David Bowie was an artist. He was a musician. He was a theatrical performer. What he was not was mainstream. —And that's why so many fans disregard Let's Dance, with its square-in-the-middle of 1980s top-40 style.

I disagree that this was Bowie pandering to the tastes of the mainstream. I posit that far from being Bowie's blatant attempt at future financial solvency, Let's Dance was actually one of the most subversive albums of Bowie's career. Let's Dance was THE great rock-n-roll swindle. Something so subversive that people never even noticed they were being taken for a ride.

On the surface, the songs are 1980s pop at it's most flamboyantly conventional. Even Bowie's look was ordinary for the time. Gone were his eyebrow-raising bodysuits and gender-bending – replaced by pastel suits (with wide shoulders and nipped waists) and a bleached, teased blonde coif. He traded the in-your-face gender confusion of the glam 1970s for the subtle feminization of masculinity that was de rigueur for the time.

And the public ate it up. The people who wrote him off as a purposefully provocative art wank suddenly embraced David Bowie's music all the way up the charts.

Underneath the top-40 sound, you have:

• an infamous punk rocker (Iggy Pop)
• a well-known (in specific circles) blues guitarist, at a time when blues was still fringe (Stevie Ray Vaughn)
• a Brazilian/Latin fusion percussionist, more versed in R&B (Sammy Figueroa)
• a washed-up disco producer other people in the music industry wouldn't touch (Nile Rodgers)

Topping it all off – like a bum-waving, middle-finger extending, slap in the face – were videos that were appeals against British colonialism and orientalism.

Yet, people looked at (and still look at) Let's Dance as nothing more than Bowie kowtowing to the capitalist public and the soul-eating music industry.

I'm still not willing to say the album's one of my favorites – there are plenty of others that I like a lot more – but I don't believe it deserves the bad rap that most fans give it. It wasn't the departure from his oeuvre that it appears to be on the surface; it's just as anti-establishment as his other works. We just weren't paying close enough attention to see it.