What David Bowie Classic Is Missing From This Minute-Long Synopsis Of His Career? [Video]
David Bowie celebrated 50 years in the music business last year. His five decades in the public eye — if you ignore the 10-year period between 2003 and 2013 when he released no new material — was marked with a compilation album and a GIF of his hairstyles. Videomaker Will Tribble took on the task of reviewing Bowie’s 50 years of public life with a one-minute live action video, that actually clocks in at 1:11.
A.V. Club praised the video for its “fun DIY attitude,” but called its elimination of one aspect of Bowie’s career “a bit of revisionist history,” cautioning viewers to “[n]ever forget nor forgive that atrocity, people.” Can you spot it?
Avid Bowie fans, or at the very least children of the 80s, will note the exclusion of Bowie’s 1985 duet with Mick Jagger, “Dancing in the Street.” The song, a remake of a 1964 hit by Martha and the Vandellas, was recorded for the Live Aid concert. Today it’s known less for its original purpose than its video, which features Bowie and Jagger dancing around the London Docklands in brightly-colored attire. In the case of Bowie, that included a leopard-print jumpsuit.
As Ultimate Classic Rock put it, “[t]here’s camp, and then there’s Bowie and Jagger’s ‘Dancing in the Street.'” The song was nonetheless a hit, presumably bringing in the dollars for famine relief. The song was top 5 in the U.K. and reached number 2 on the U.S. charts.
When A.V. Club wrote its piece on the video, Tribble explained over Twitter why Bowie and Jagger’s athletics didn’t make the cut.
Wow, a real honour to get in @TheAVClub! http://t.co/bwDL74JhSf. We REALLY wanted to do Dancing in the Street but couldn’t fit it in
— Will Tribble (@WillTribble) February 26, 2015
@TheAVClub It was the 1st thing my co-writer Geoff Gedroyc wanted to do. I thought about giving someone Jagger Jowls with board marker
— Will Tribble (@WillTribble) February 26, 2015
A musicless version of the “Dancing in the Street” video came out last year. Stereogum remarked that “it’s funnier than it should be.” The nearly one-minute clip of the rock legends’ antics has no song to accompany it, only a few choice sound effects: some grunts and the pattering of feet. A.V. Club wrote about the video’s brilliance in an earlier piece.
“In this age of elaborate music videos with engaging visuals and planned choreography, it’s easy to forget the unencumbered joys of two men prancing awkwardly together in empty buildings and streets.”
The video itself was already notorious, but A.V. Club called the musicless version “decidedly weirder.”
David Bowie’s compilation album Nothing Has Changed was released in November.
[David Bowie and Mick Jagger images courtesy of Getty]
