David Bowie - China Girl

Thursday, time for a cover.

"China Girl" is a song written by Iggy Pop and David Bowie during their years in Berlin, first appearing on Pop's debut solo album "The Idiot" (1977). The song became more widely known when it was re-recorded by Bowie, who released it as the second single from his most commercially successful album, "Let's Dance" (1983).

But on the other hand, they wrote the song together, so it's not really a cover. Bowie also produced Pop's version.

Paul Trynka, the author of the David Bowie biography, Starman, explains the song was inspired by Iggy Pop's infatuation with Kuelan Nguyen, a Vietnamese woman, as a metaphor for his STOOGES career.

Production-wise the original recording that appeared on "The Idiot" is raw and unpolished compared to Bowie's hit remake in 1983.

Nile Rodgers, the producer of David Bowie's 1983 version of the song, offered his own interpretation of the lyrics: "I figured China Girl was about doing drugs ... because China is China White which is heroin, girl is cocaine. I thought it was a song about speedballing. I thought, in the drug community in New York, coke is girl, and heroin is boy. So then I proceeded to do this arrangement which was ultra pop. Because I thought that, being David Bowie, he would appreciate the irony of doing something so pop about something so taboo. And what was really cool was that he said 'I love that!'.

The music video, featuring New Zealand model Geeling Ng, was directed by David Mallet and shot mainly in the Chinatown district of Sydney, Australia. Along with his previous single's video for "Let's Dance" with the critique of racism in Australia, Bowie described the video as a "very simple, very direct" statement against racism. The video consciously parodies Asian female stereotypes. It depicted as a hypermasculine protagonist in an interracial romance. The original video release includes the two lying naked in the surf (a visual reference to the film From Here to Eternity). Unedited versions were banned from New Zealand and some other countries at the time. The uncensored version was issued on the 1984 "Video EP" issued by Sony on Betamax, VHS and LaserDisc. Versions of the video included on subsequent video and DVD compilations (including EMI/Virgin's Best of Bowie) are censored to remove the nudity. The original video went on to win an MTV video award for Best Male Video.

Enjoy today's version of "China Girl", taken from Bowie's album "Let's Dance", the single was released 31 May 1983.



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