Still can't believe David Bowie released a brand new song this week. If you haven't heard his comeback track, Where Are We Now, where have you been??? Check it out here.
Once I digested the news of Bowie's surprise return, I reminisced over the last 25 years of his discography and realized he hasn't made any classic albums in that time span. The LP's he has made during the late eighties, nineties and the aughts have been just so so. My two favourite recent albums by Bowie are probably the industrial tinged Earthling with the great song I'm Afraid of Americans and his last album the art rock sounding Reality.
Before that, his last great album-and probably his best selling LP- was the 1983 pop masterpiece Let's Dance. The title track was a number 1 hit in both the U.S. and the U.K. and the album also produced the smash hits Modern Love and the re-worked China Girl which was first written for Iggy Pop. Also on the album was the song Cat People (Putting Out the Fire) which was released as a single, with the production of Giorgio Moroder, a couple of years earlier and re-recorded for the album.
The song might be more familiar nowadays for being featured in Quentin Tarantino's movie Inglorious Basterds. This is probably one of the best uses of a song in a movie. The track plays while the main female protagonist in the film, Shoshanna, is preparing to burn down a theatre which will trap all of the Nazi elite, including Hitler, in the fire. Some people criticize that the song is misplaced and that a pop song from the eighties should not be in a historical drama. Besides the similar theme of the song's lyrics to this part of the film, in a roundabout way the track fits perfectly with the scene in the movie. Bowie originally recorded the goth rock influenced Cat People for the movie with the same name in 1982-which was a re-make of the 1942 classic horror movie. In just so happens that Inglorious Basterds takes place in the same time period. Anyhow... watch the original music video for the song below:
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