The creative relationship between David Bowie and Iggy Pop during the Berlin period — 1976 through 1979, the years that produced The Idiot, Lust for Life, Low, Heroes, and Lodger — is the most productive creative friendship in rock history, measured not by commercial output but by the quality of what the two men produced when they were in each other’s company and what each enabled the other to produce that could not have been produced alone. Bowie brought to the collaboration a structural intelligence and a production sophistication that Pop’s raw instincts needed and had not previously found. Pop brought an authenticity and a willingness to go to extreme emotional places that Bowie’s increasing sophistication had begun to mediate in ways the music did not benefit from.
Bowie wrote China Girl for Iggy Pop — wrote it with Pop, in the collaborative method of the Berlin sessions that produced music by conversation and improvisation rather than by individual composition. The song appeared on The Idiot in 1977 and then on Bowie’s own Let’s Dance in 1983 in an arrangement so different from the original that the two versions constitute separate musical objects that happen to share a lyric.
The lyric is about desire and destruction — about the specific quality of a relationship with someone who represents something dangerous and beautiful simultaneously, and about the inability to resist that quality despite understanding its cost. Pop has said the lyric describes something about him that he had not been able to describe to himself — that the song arrived from outside his own perspective and produced a recognition that his own accounts of his psychological life had not achieved.
He has said this in the specific vocabulary of someone who has spent fifty years thinking about what they are and who has found, in a song written about them by someone else, an accuracy that their own self-examination had not produced. The recognition was not comfortable — he has not described it as flattering — but it was the specific recognition of something true, which is the highest quality that any piece of language can produce.
Bowie’s Let’s Dance version — with Nile Rodgers’s production and the commercial ambition of a man consciously making music for the largest possible audience — produced a pop song of considerable grace and a number one single in multiple countries. The The Idiot version — rough, slightly unstable, Pop’s voice at the edge of its control — is the one that contains the thing Iggy recognized. The recognition requires the roughness. The polish of Let’s Dance is beautiful but it is too well-managed to hold what the Berlin version holds.
Pop has said he cannot hear China Girl without the specific response of someone encountering a description of themselves that is more accurate than their own. He has said this is uncomfortable. He has said he would not trade it for a version that was less accurate.
Bowie died in January 2016. Pop has spoken about the loss in terms that are the most emotionally exposed he has given in public — a man who spent his career in the most extreme register of emotional expression finding that the loss of a specific person required a register he did not previously have available. The song that described him more accurately than he could describe himself was written by the person whose loss he cannot describe at all.