Bowie’s 1983 Message About Australian Racism Against Aboriginals Still Relevant in 2016

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Bowie’s 1983 Message About Australian Racism Against Aboriginals Still Relevant in 2016

by sandraphflowers

Asked in interviews over the years about his “Let’s Dance” song, David Bowie often expressed mixed feelings. I can’t help but think, however, that he’d be pleased to learn that the Let’s Dance Official Video has turned out to be one of his most enduring works in terms of societal concerns. This realization came to me immediately upon seeing the title of an article in the October 25, 2016, edition of Australia’s Guardian US by journalist Melissa Davey.

Davey’s article, “Aboriginal children in care ‘isolated from family and culture,’ says Victorian report” echoes concerns Bowie conveyed symbolically in the “Let’s Dance” video. Filmed in Australia, the video features two Aboriginal youngsters engaged in back-breaking labor who were offered an opportunity to escape into the white world but ultimately decided that they preferred their own culture.

“My idea,” Bowie explained in an interview in Australia during the hugely successful Serious Moonlight Tour, “was to present an indigenous people in a capitalist white, mainly white society and the problems of the interrelationships between the two” (Countdown [Australia]- Molly Meldrum Interviews David Bowie- Humdrum- November 6, 1983).

The meaning of the “Let’s Dance” video and “China Girl,” also made for Serious Moonlight, had arisen six months earlier in another interview. At that time, Bowie bluntly explained, “The message that they [the videos] have is very simple—it’s wrong to be racist!”

Continuing, he said, “I see no reason to fuck about with that message, you see? I thought, ‘Let’s try to use the video format as a platform for some kind of social observation, and not just waste it on trotting out and trying to enhance the public image of the singer involved’” (“The Man Who Owned the World,” Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone, excerpted from the RS May 12, 1983 Special Collectors Edition, May 20, 2016, 40-41).

Now, thirty-three years later, comes Davey’s unsettling article on a report from Australia’s commissioner for Aboriginal children and young people. One statement in particular struck me with regard to Bowie’s message: “Children [placed in out-of-home care] were too often placed into a system that did not value or respect Aboriginal people and their culture and which failed to keep children safe over generations.”

That “system that did not value or respect Aboriginal people and their culture” is part of the very system Bowie called out all those years ago. To use a word he often used in interviews about how he and other artists worked and thought, he was certainly “prescient” about this one.

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sandraphflowers is now tweeting Bowie-and-related-biz under the name @revisingmyself. Follow her there if your primary interest is Bowie. For everything else, follow @sandraphflowers.