David Bowie | Space Oddity | The Man Who Sold the World | Hunky Dory
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars | Aladdin Sane | Pin Ups | Diamond Dogs | Young Americans
Station to Station | Low | "Heroes" | Lodger | Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) | Let's Dance | Tonight | Never Let Me Down
Tin Machine | Black Tie White Noise | The Buddha of Suburbia | Outside | Earthling | 'hours...' | Heathen | Reality | 'hours...'
The Next Day | ★ | Changesonebowie
- Blooper: The very first CD release in Germany bears a banner on the disc face claiming that the album was digitally recorded, a statement contradicted by various interview comments stating that the album was actually recorded with typical analog equipment. All later CD releases remove the claim, completely omitting any references to how the album was recorded and only saying at most that it was digitally mastered (a necessity for CD releases).
- Career Resurrection: In addition to breaking Bowie into the international mainstream, Let's Dance also did wonders for its producer, Chic alum Nile Rodgers. In an essay written for the 2018 Loving the Alien [1983-1988] Boxed Set, Rodgers credited his work on the album for breaking him out of the persistent stigma against disco and anything that sounded even vaguely like it during the early 1980's, with the album's success catapulting Rodgers into in-demand status as a producer & collaborator that still continues to this day.
- Channel Hop: Bowie shifted from RCA Records to EMI America Records with this album, due to a mix of souring relations between himself and RCA, a perception that the label was "milking" his back-catalog (RCA issued three different compilation albums and a single release of his old Bing Crosby duet in 1980-1982 alone), and lingering resentment over a costly severance agreement with his old manager, Tony Defries, that gave the latter partial control over his output during 1975-1982.
- Creator-Driven Successor: Bowie himself considered this album one to Young Americans, as both are uncharacteristically mainstream-accessible albums consisting of eight songs that combine black music (soul and funk for Young Americans, post-disco for Let's Dance) with Bowie's trademark dark & artsy musical and lyrical undercurrents.
- Fake Nationality: The actress who appears in the "China Girl" video? She's actually from New Zealand.
- Pop-Culture Urban Legends: According to popular myth, Bowie initially intended to include the original 1982 version of "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" on the album. However, when MCA Records (the record company of Giorgio Moroder, who collaborated with Bowie on the original version) refused to license it out to EMI America Records, Bowie instead opted to re-record the song. However, in 2019, biographer Chris O'Leary clarified that Bowie had always intended to re-record the track, having been dissatisfied by the original version.
- Newbie Boom: The album's success as a result of Bowie explicitly gunning for mass appeal brought a bunch of new, younger fans aboard.
- Referenced by...:
- Frank Zappa (who had a long-standing and one-sided animus against Bowie, partly stemming from Bowie's poaching of his sidemen Aynsley Dunbar and Adrian Belew in 1978) would mock the music video for "Let's Dance" in his anti-MTV song "Be In My Video" (1984) from Them or Us:
We will dance the blues (oh yes)
Let's dance the blues (we will dance them very much)
Let's dance the blues (sure we will) under the megawatt moonlight!- "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" was used in Inglourious Basterds from 2009 during the scene where Shoshanna sets the film theatre on fire.
- In the Doctor Who serial "Survival", Derek wears a Let's Dance tee shirt underneath his jacket.
- Throw It In!: According to Nile Rodgers, the Regional Riff in "China Girl" was improvised as a joke just before the track was to be recorded; Bowie was hugely enthusiastic about the riff when he heard it, feeling that it perfectly fit the song's message against Asian fetishization, and made it an integral part of the track.
- What Could Have Been:
- RCA Records were willing to negotiate a new contract for Bowie, which in theory would've resulted in Let's Dance being released through them. Geffen Records and Columbia Records also expressed interest in signing Bowie, the former having already grabbed the US contract for fellow British art rocker Peter Gabriel and the latter being the US distributor for one of Bowie's influences, Pink Floyd. Bowie, however, declined all three labels' offers, signing with EMI America Records instead thanks to his positive experiences working with EMI signees Queen; he would eventually move to Columbia anyways in 2002.
- Longtime collaborator Tony Visconti was originally scheduled to produce this album, only for Bowie to hire Nile Rogers instead without Visconti's knowledge. The move heavily damaged the personal and professional relationship between Bowie and Visconti, who wouldn't work with one another again until 1998, when the two reunited to record an ultimately-scrapped song for The Rugrats Movie, and the two wouldn't become regular collaborators again until Heathen in 2002.
- According to Queen drummer Roger Taylor, Bowie's Cover Version of "Criminal World" was originally recorded as a drunken collaboration with him after the sessions for Hot Space but prior to the sessions for Let's Dance. Taylor stated that this early version "wasn't very good."
- A somewhat odder example happened with the world tour for the album; the specific dates the tour covered ended up conflicting with the taping sessions for the Doctor Who serial "The Caves of Androzani", which Bowie was asked to star in as main antagonist Sharaz Jek. As a result of these conflicts, Bowie's manager quietly had to turn The BBC down. Had there been no such conflict, one might imagine that Bowie might've been able to appear on the show to great effect, given Jek's embodiment of the "cruel elegance" Bowie was known for as an actor.
