“Bang Bang” should’ve been a hit single in the first place, Bowie said, so all he was doing was giving a lost gem more exposure.
And he was assuming that he would work with Pop again soon-Bowie talked vaguely about another collaboration in 1988 or 1989, after both of their tours were over. Bowie’s response was basically ‘Eric Clapton regularly covers Robert Johnson, so I cover Iggy Pop.’ “ I always try to do my bit, do something of his,” he said. Still, this made for the third record in a row in which Bowie had padded things out with a Pop cover, and journalists were calling Bowie on it. It was an odd choice to end the record, if an understandable one: given the pileup of disasters on Side 2, “Bang Bang” at least had hooks and some energy. “ Bang bang! I got mine!…Bang bang! that’s all it means, man…/here, have a glass of wine.”įive years later, Bowie cut a version of “Bang Bang” and made it the album closer for Never Let Me Down.
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Kral (a Patti Smith Group veteran, who played organ on the track) had originally written the lyric, which he later described as being “a song about the emancipation of women.” Pop rewrote it to address his usual themes-underage heartbreaker girls TV as corrupter and comforter (“ I keep a good friend on videotape“) insatiable greed and pride as core American virtues. There was even a video made for it, though the result was so creepy (see first link above) that I wonder if even the starved-for-content MTV of 1981 aired it.* Released as a single in the summer of 1981, “Bang Bang” had potential to be a left-field New Wave hit in the vein of “Turning Japanese” but it lacked the sharpness and punch to hit on the radio and it flopped (it did make the lower reaches of Billboard’s club chart). The result sounded as if Pop had joined some Satanic incarnation of the Cars. Boyce allegedly spent much of the time scoring drugs with Pop (the pair once even locked Kral in a closet when he tried to hinder them), but he liked “Bang Bang” and turned it into a passable New Wave single by reducing it to a collection of hooks: the repeated title phrase, coming down like two hammer blows the ominous descending organ/bass line the strings the strategically-placed tambourine.
After the initial sessions for Party had petered out due to Pop’s self-sabotage and uninspired performances, his exasperated label Arista brought in Tommy Boyce (who had co-written “Last Train to Clarksville”) to make something useable out of the material. Iggy Pop and Ivan Kral wrote “Bang Bang” in 1980 as a potential single for Pop’s album Party.
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