This is a song written by David Bowie for the 1980 album Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, featuring lead guitar played by King Crimson's Robert Fripp. The song is in two parts, opening and closing the album.
"It's No Game (Part 1)" features a shouted Japanese female lyric, interspersed with Bowie singing the translation. The female Japanese singer is Michi Hirota, who was at the time a member of Japan's Red Buddha Theatre, which was performing in London. Bowie was looking for a strident female vocalist: "I wanted to break down a particular type of sexist attitude about women. I thought the [idea of] the 'Japanese girl' typifies it, where everyone pictures them as a geisha girl, very sweet, demure and non-thinking, when in fact that's the absolute opposite of what women are like. They think an awful lot, with quite as much strength as any man. I wanted to caricature that attitude by having a very forceful Japanese voice on it. So I had [Hirota] come out with a very samurai kind of thing."
Back in 1974, Hirota was one of the Japanese geisha girls (the one on the right), on the cover of Sparks' album Kimono My House.
See your Spotify stats (with number of plays and minutes listened) and discover new music.
Music data, artist images, album covers, and song previews are provided by Spotify. Spotify is a trademark of Spotify AB.