Two of the most important pop albums are celebrating their anniversaries this year: 50 years of ALADDIN SANE and 40 years of LET’S DANCE. Two pivotal works by David Bowie. How well did they hold up?
On Friday April 20, 1973, David Bowie wakes up in a Tokyo hotel. The musician is 26 years old and is on his first tour of Japan. He celebrated a bit: The day before, April 19, his sixth studio album ALADDIN SANE was released in Great Britain. Now his manager Tony Defries informs him that no UK album since The Beatles’ ABBEY ROAD had received so many pre-orders.
With the release of ALADDIN SANE, which sold a hundred thousand copies right away, Bowie looks back on the craziest year of his life to date: after a tough start to his career, he had his big breakthrough in 1972 as the fictional character Ziggy Stardust. For a year, the band’s concerts were accompanied by a veritable Ziggy mania, which reached an unexpected climax in Japan.
This is also the case in Tokyo: In the evening, Bowie plays a concert with the Spiders From Mars, where the static of the Shibuya Kōkaidō performance location will suffer lasting damage from the jumping fans. The musician escaped the subsequent police investigations by traveling by ship via Yokohama to Vladivostok the morning after the performance. His well-known fear of flying suits Bowie, the officials were looking for him at the airport.
ALADDIN SANE appears almost forty years to the day in the midst of this madness, which apparently was already beginning to outgrow Bowie. The album doesn’t bear its title for nothing, A Lad Insanea crazy boy, that was of course the artist himself. The Spiders guitarist Mick Ronson once recalled that Bowie had already informed him and manager Defries in Tokyo that he wanted to bury the overpowered fictional character Ziggy at the end of the current tour.
ALADDIN SANE’s cover, photographed by Brian Duffy, sees the extraterrestrial pop star once again in all his dazzling extravagance and for the only time sporting the famous Flash design on his face – Ziggy’s most iconic image. It is the first album Bowie wrote as a successful pop star. Most of the songs were created on the endless tour to the predecessor ZIGGY STARDUST, ALADDIN SANE was recorded during short tour breaks in London and New York.
In particular, Bowie described his first major US tour as a formative inspiration – the intoxicating performances in the evening found expression in songs such as “Watch That Man”, “Cracked Actor” or “The Jean Genie”, the endlessly stretched bus trips to the next performance location the huge country in the elegiac “Drive-In Saturday”, “The Prettiest Star” or “Time”. The American influence is also noticeable musically: Even forty years later, you can still hear ALADDIN SANE with its wind instruments and choral singing as a fantastic hinge album between Bowie’s glam rock phase and the years that followed, which were influenced by soul and funk. ALADDIN SANE is also influenced in a special way by the American jazz pianist Mike Garson, who worked repeatedly with Bowie in the decades to come, but was never allowed to let off steam as he did here: the dramatic chords in the title song, the freely oscillating jazz runs in “Lady Grinning Soul”, the vaudeville-like game in “Time” – Mike Garson gently dominates this album.
After ALADDIN SANE then LET’S DANCE
The signs were completely different ten years later: David Bowie had shaped the seventies artistically like no other British pop star, expanding his stylistic possibilities with every album and inspiring countless imitators with every phase of his work. He enjoyed artistic recognition and above all freedom, had played with countless fantastic musicians and had quite a number of hits. But David Bowie had not yet become a global megastar, as was typical of the 1980s.
He now thought to change that: On April 14, 1983, almost ten years to the day after ALADDIN SANE, LET’S DANCE was released, Bowie’s by far most commercially successful, but also most controversial album. For decades LET’S DANCE was considered mainstream pandering and commercial junk, but even though he recycled his own songs like “China Girl” written with Iggy Pop in 1976 or “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” and covered “Criminal World”, LET’S DANCE is much better than its reputation. What Bowie did on this album was conceptually very typical of him: he took disco to look at a musical scene he loved, teamed up with a defining protagonist of that scene – the genius Nile Rodgers of Chic – by adding the initially completely unknown, soon universally revered guitar prodigy Stevie Ray Vaughn a link to blues and rhythm and blues and transformed it all into radiant pop under his golden hand – Ray Vaughn has thus shaped this album in a similar way as Mike Garson ten years before ALADDIN SANE. And “Let’s Dance”, the world hit itself, stands out as one of the great songs of the 80s.
From today’s point of view, both birthday children, ALADDIN SANE and LET’S DANCE, count among David Bowie’s strongest works in different ways.
What do you all mean?
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