The Let’s Dance album has one foot in the past (good) and one in the future (bad).
Modern Love is the problem. It gave Bowie a third hit single, and it is unabashedly poppy. His most commercial song ever, perhaps, and at least since Pin Ups (which nobody liked much but was his biggest selling album of the 70s, weirdly).
It has horns and is happy and the lyrics feel positive. If it didn’t sell, how different things could have been!
But allegedly Bowie wanted hits… I can’t help but feel that he figured out that disco was cool, and he wanted to have a disco hit, but in the end he got some sort of hybrid thing, uncategorizable as usual.
- Let’s Dance is not a disco hit, it is disco-adjacent.
- China Girl is dark as, and with different production it could have been on Scary Monsters.
- Cat People didn’t even need a change in production to fit into the previous album.
- Let’s Dance would’ve been dark, but that riff made it a hit, and the chosen key.
- Ricochet is probably from the Lodger era, and Criminal World was a cover.
- Shake It shouldn’t have appeared on any album.
So weirdly, Bowie put out a 8-track album, consisting of four songs that belonged on previous albums, one new “disco” hit, Without You, wherever that fits, and two duds.
In retrospect, four songs could have been daringly released as singles and added to re-releases of older albums, Without You saved for later, and the two duds used a B-sides for Let’s Dance. And then we could’ve avoided the album, the massive tour, and given Bowie time to reflect on things and choose his next direction.
Modern Love also had the spoken bit, and he used that a fair bit in his following albums, which he got wrong.