Let's Dance (David Bowie Album) - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

The album was generally positively reviewed by critics, and well received by fans, with at least one reviewer calling it "Bowie at his best."

The success of the album surprised Bowie. In 1997, he said "at the time, Let's Dance was not mainstream. It was virtually a new kind of hybrid, using blues-rock guitar against a dance format. There wasn't anything else that really quite sounded like that at the time. So it only seems commercial in hindsight because it sold so many . It was great in its way, but it put me in a real corner in that it fucked with my integrity."

In fact, Bowie would later state that the success of the album caused him to hit a creative low-point in his career which lasted the next few years. "I remember looking out over these waves of people and thinking, 'I wonder how many Velvet Underground albums these people have in their record collections?' I suddenly felt very apart from my audience. And it was depressing, because I didn't know what they wanted."