A Reassessment of David Bowie’s Later Career Begins With “Let’s Dance”

John Wohlmacher has launched a longform essay series at Beats Per Minute dedicated to David Bowie’s post-1980 output. Titled “His best since Scary Monsters,” it borrows the phrase critics and fans repeated for nearly every record Bowie released after that 1980 landmark. The first installment takes on 1983’s Let’s Dance, the album that brought him blockbuster commercial success but also, in the eyes of many, marked a turn toward the mainstream.

The series sets out to examine a period often dismissed as lesser work sandwiched between the classic run of the 1970s and the late-career creative resurgence that began in the 1990s. Wohlmacher treats these albums not as footnotes but as layered projects worth serious attention. Let’s Dance, with its sharp production by Nile Rodgers and hits like “Modern Love” and “China Girl,” arrives first in the series for good reason: it still divides opinion decades later, praised for its sleekness yet sometimes framed as the start of Bowie’s artistic decline.

By zeroing in on the gap between public reception and musical substance, the essay avoids mere nostalgia. It acknowledges what made Let’s Dance a phenomenon while questioning why later Bowie records were so often measured against the same yardstick. The series promises more installments, each peeling back a different chapter of an artist who never stopped moving. For anyone who has struggled to make sense of the 1980s and 1990s albums, this grounded, context-driven approach offers a useful starting point.