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Detractors think of him as a particularly shrewd trendy, but the reason Bowie may so often be in the right place at the right time is that the audience looks for him to be there. He is the perpetual Next Big Thing. The feeling seems to be, if David's into it, then let's get on with it. He has two of the prime qualities every highflying avatar needs: a restless imagination and a roving eye. "Never wear a new pair of shoes in front of him," his friend Mick Jagger once joked. People or music, the pattern is the same. Says his old crony and frequent producer Tony Visconti: "David will spend a very passionate, intense time with someone he loves, and he'll take notes. When he has what he wants and things have reached the point of stagnation, he goes on."
He may have heard it coming or guessed or lucked out, but whatever, the freewheeling, free-form sound that critics are calling the New Music slips neatly into Bowie's own new groove. If it is casual and a little cool, a little anonymous and a touch technocratic, then it must be New Music and Let's Dance. Talking about the album, Bowie can sound almost evangelistic, like Billy Graham on a crusade. He speaks of "positive music, something that has an inward glow to it, something that still has something to say but is more than the general kind of nihilistic thing I and some of my peers have been associated with." Instead, he aims to "swim against the tide of lethargy and nihilism"—this from the same man who swam upstream in those very waters not seven years ago, spawning madly. Now what he wants is "a sound which says, 'This is what emotion feels like.' "
He found it close to home. By the late '70s, Bowie had worked with synthesizers and what he calls the "Euro-techo sound": lots of strange, synthesized instruments serenading one another like computer banks pitching woo. On Let's Dance, he wedded those sounds to old rhythm and blues undercurrents and an idle jazz strain—as he says, "everything from Little Richard to John Coltrane." The result, modeled on "music that used to lift me up and make me feel really happy," was less a return to basics than a reappraisal of them.
The new album's wonderful opening, Modern Love, which becomes the climactic clincher of the concert, ticks off the failing solaces of contemporary life, such as love and religion, while a bouncy chorus invokes "God and man" as if they were the co-owners of the corner candy store. Let's Dance, a love song rilled with the promise of passion and the threat of impermanence under "this serious moonlight," has one of those weird, hypnotic choruses that uses the colors and objects of dreams like surrealistic talismans: "Let's dance/ Put on your red shoes and dance the blues."