What shouldn’t aging rock stars do when they feel themselves fast approaching the tipping point of total irrelevancy? Simple: make a video of themselves fopping about in an overly fey manner to that hoary old Martha and the Vandellas chestnut, “Dancing in the Street.”
Just about everybody, with the possible exception of G.G. Allin, has taken a stab at it, leading to such a glut of cover takes that a hidden codicil of the 1938 Munich Pact banned future versions of the song. Unfortunately no one thought to inform Mick Jagger or David Bowie of this fact, and the result is one of the most unintentionally hilarious videos in rock history.
It opens with a shot of Mick Jagger’s hideous yellow sneakers bopping up and down, and it’s all downhill from there. The boys are attired awfully—Bowie is wearing, for reasons known only to Bowie, a white lab coat over a camo jumper—and spend the entire video camping it up like two aging queens on methamphetamines, leaping up and down, swapping lines, standing back to back while making “dance like an Egyptian” arm gestures, and singing with their respective rock star lips about an inch apart.
Meanwhile, Jagger does his rooster strut, the elderly dandies do a syncopated swim, and Bowie takes a flying leap off a set of steps and on the way down looks authentically frightened. Old people have brittle bones, and I think he knew it.
In fact, there are so many asinine moments in this video it’s difficult to pick a favorite. Mine takes place in a dilapidated hallway, where Jagger pops out of an open doorway like a demented coxcomb while Bowie does a leg kick out another. Or perhaps it’s when Jagger cries “Oooh!” as the duo dance down a deserted street doing the bump, Jagger’s yellow sneakers suddenly white. Or, going back to that hallway, it could be the moment when the Mickster charges the camera and, eyes psychotically wide, shouts, “Back in the U.S.S.R.!”, managing to make himself look like a deranged Kennedy Assassination conspiracist screaming about the truth as guys with the butterfly nets come to drag him off to the nearest loony bin.
And the sad part is that, as far as covers of “Dancing in the Street” go, I’ve heard far, far worse. Listening to the Grateful Dead’s version, for example, was the worst thing to happen to me since a former girlfriend’s finch (which she let fly about her bedroom, zoom, zoom) landed on my pecker and, perhaps taking it for the worm of its dreams, took a peck. (True story.) And both Bowie and Jagger are in good voice.
But the question remains: Is there anyone, anywhere, as in the entire world, who really wants to hear yet another take on “Dancing in the Street”? The song has become a cliché and the last refuge of a washed-up scoundrel, or scoundrels in the case of Jagger and Bowie. In any event the song is the nadir of both men’s careers, which is saying something when you consider any one of Mick’s solo albums or that Bowie monstrosity, “Let’s Dance.”
