Let's Dance 👱❤️🎸👠👠🕊️☮️ (© David Bowie, 1983). UHD 4K. Performed (2025) by RE-VO

~WATCH THIS VIDEO IN 4k Ultra HD. Select "Settings" or select the [red] HD button.... and then choose 2160p.

LET’S DANCE (© David Bowie, 1983)
Performed by RE-VO

Copyright disclaimer, under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976. This is a NONPROFIT VIDEO made for study, review, or critical analysis purposes only. Personal, non-profit, educational, or personal use tilts the balance in favor of fair use.

😃 RE-VO: lead vocal, 8 supporting vocals, 2 Fender Stratocasters, Emulator IV, Oberheim OB8 vst, Yamaha Motif (congas, djembe, wood blocks, vibraslap), DSK Sax vst, Native Session horns vst, Michael Tobias 5-string bass, Ludwig v-drums, tambourine, maracas.

👩🏽 CC White: 4 supporting vocals

Special thanks to:

😃 The brilliant Mikeguitar6    • Let's Dance Outro Solo (Cover)   : Stratocaster solo {in the style of SRV, 1954-1990}.

¬Audio by RE-VO © 2025.
~Video by RE-VO, June 9, 2025
~Thumbnail: Esteemed philanthropist Iman Abdulmajid Bowie, considered among the most beautiful women on Earth.
~Moonlight by Ambient Sanctuary.

~Doing your own Bowie? The key is in Bowie’s Brixton accent. Now, heavy smoker… sing in the throat, as if your mouth is full of marbles (“uh-der the moonlight”). Finally, be angelic… and don’t be stingy with the old-timey Antares-vst timbral-shift function.

~Visit RE-VO at https://altavilla.wordpress.com/

~I dedicate this vid to my old buddy Ken Holmberg, a fellow Bowie-bro who does his own way-cool impressions of the great one. Love ya, Ken. 💗    / @kennethholmbergoriginalmus2582  

“Having released an album almost every year throughout the 70s… Bowie fell unusually quiet at the start of the 80s…. A new song, ‘Let’s Dance,’ emerged in March 1983… this time, in league with co-conspirator Nile Rodgers, Bowie let loose a genre-melding song that was also calibrated for success in the pop realm.” (https://www.davidbowie.com/)

“Bowie first started to distance himself from the [album] in 1987 when he claimed Let's Dance was more Rodgers' vision than his, which the producer has since refuted. A full decade later, Bowie revealed the album's accompanying tour confirmed one of his biggest fears: ‘I was something I never wanted to be. I was a well-accepted artist. I had started appealing to people who bought Phil Collins albums.’” Jon O’Brien. (2023). ‘Let’s Dance’ at 40. Grammy.com.

Still, in honour of Canada’s National Indigenous Peoples’ Day (June 21), I play a song which, at the start of the MTV era (1983), Bowie bravely promoted using a strident video about colonialist domination of aboriginal peoples.

Watch now: Let’s Dance (Official Video):    • David Bowie - Let's Dance (Official Video)  

“While the clip… was described by its co-director David Mallett as “intentionally anti-racist”, the song itself wasn’t overtly political.... Bowie loved Australia… but he wasn’t blind to this country’s dark history….”

Bowie plucked two Aboriginal performers from obscurity – Terry Roberts and Jolene King…. As King told Fairfax in 2013, “[The clip] showed the rest of the world that there are Indigenous people here in Australia, and that we’re not this textbook carbon copy of someone standing there with a spear; that there are modern Aboriginals, and this is one version [of them].”

There are confronting scenes: King scrubbing floors with her hands, and Roberts barefoot, dragging heavy machinery up a busy city street. The symbolism was unmissable: Indigenous struggle and suffering against the prosperity of white Australia. Bowie himself summed it up to ABC’s Countdown as “a direct statement about integration of one culture with another.” Stan Grant. (2016). How David Bowie's Let's Dance shone a light on Australia's Indigenous struggle. London: The Guardian.

He taught political lessons, even at what he considered to be his worst moment: on an album that (yikes!) sold millions and brought his career to a screeching halt (?) as he drank in the horror of his success [I know… I don’t get that part either].

Yet, you can’t write off Bowie as some pop has-been.

“A significant part of his legacy is in the ways he went about being an artist. His restlessness. His refusal to stay in one place. He brought sophisticated art-world radicalism to pop, and in borrowing those techniques, he captivated listeners—and challenged them at the same time.” Tom Moon. (2016). On David Bowie: Empty Voids.... Medium.

Even today, the video offers great wisdom. Ultimately, when the video’s protagonists become disillusioned with the West, they symbolically trod upon the red shoes and walk away, rejecting white affluence, only to discover that the inequities of civilization wait just beyond the hill.

Don’t be complacent, dear friends. Practice an inclusive worldview. In support of the rights of indigenous peoples, write letters to your representatives. Protest. Become a champion of diversity, equity and inclusion. Choose Democracy.

Peace, love, and friendship to all my friends 😃💗
😃🎸🙏💗 Mac (aka RE-VO)