David Bowie – “Let’s Dance” (1983)
In the ’80s, most of the baby boomer rock stars who’d come up in past decades were still trying to make versions of the bluesy rock that came naturally to them. They were doing what they could to keep up, feathering their hair and piling on the synths, but most of them were fundamentally unwilling to change the basic contours of their styles. David Bowie was different. There’s something beautifully perverse about Bowie coming back from a long period in the chart wilderness, hitting #1 with a single where he asks us to “dance the blues” to a song that — even with Stevie Ray Vaughan soloing all over it — sounds absolutely nothing like any conventional notion of “the blues.” But then, willful perversity was the David Bowie brand.
