David Bowie – China Girl
#quotefromthe80s
I'm a mess without my little China girl
Wake up in the morning, where's my little China girl
I hear her heart's beating loud as thunder
I saw the stars crashing down
#DavidBowie #ChinaGirl
It was just two months since the great success of “Let’s dance“, the hit which landed the ice-eyed alien on the planet 80s, when the alien himself introduced the world to another huge success. Actually, the roots of this song go many years back, when Bowie worked in Berlin with the great Iggy Pop, from whom he deinitely drew great inspiration. Well, Iggy had an infatuation for a girl who was in the recording studio, but he couldn’t do much for it, because she was the girlfriend of one of the musicians, a French guy. And so, he wrote a song for her, with some geographical approximation, since the girl was actually Vietnamese.
Iggy Pop did not really find much success with “China girl”, but Bowie decided to try a different arrangement, and submitted it to one of the greatest musicians and producers, Nile Rodgers, leader and guitarist of Chic, who during the 80s would have produced songs like “Original sin” by INXS, “Like a virgin” by Madonna, “The reflex” and “Notorious” , and today is the producer of people like Lady Gaga or Daft Punk.
So he goes to Nile Rodgers and asks him for a new arrangement. Nile accepts the challenge, and since lyrics talk about a Chinese girl, he creates the oriental riff that characterizes the song, thinking… with this music, either Bowie will fire me or we will break the world. And in fact Bowie liked Rodgers’s version, he had rearranged it and it sounded quite different from Iggy Pop’s. He releases the song on May 31, 1983.
The video has some elements in common with “Let’s dance”, I would say a certain exoticism. The protagonist was a New Zealand girl of Vietnamese descent (again!), who later starred also in “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”, the film of “We don’t need another hero”, and today she is a famous presenter and cooking expert. She was a Bowie fan and it seemed impossible for her to shoot a video with him. In fact, after the video they started dating for a while.
Many believe that the song has an anti-capitalist flavour, judging by some verses in the final part of the song, and this would be another trait in common with “Let’s dance”. Personally I am not of this opinion, since the song has far away roots and arises from much more human feelings.
David Bowie on Wikipedia
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