Country music embraces a new form of modern love as David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” brings the late British rocker his first shot at a potential songwriting credit on a country hit.
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RCA Nashville released a new Chris Young track, “Young Love and Saturday Nights,” to digital service providers on Sept. 21. The song is an interpolation, built on the chorus melody and iconic, burning guitar riff of Bowie’s proto-punk “Rebel Rebel,” originally issued on the 1974 Diamond Dogs album that RCA distributed in the United States.
It’s easy to be skeptical of the country revision before hearing it — the raw original track was part of Bowie’s androgynous/theatrical period and is now being repurposed as a small-town Southern anthem at a time when many conservatives line up against challenges to gender conformity. But the adaption faithfully re-creates the original’s garage-band drum sound and distorted guitar riff, matching up well with the new version’s working-class lyrics.
“What they were after was the riffs,” suggests Dreamcatcher Management partner Jim Mazza, who signed Bowie to EMI when he headed the label’s global operations in 1983, launching the partnership with the album Let’s Dance.
And Mazza believes Bowie would have been happy with the new recording’s treatment of his classic.
“The British rockers have such a respect for American art — for country music in particular,” says Mazza, who has no affiliation with the new recording. “It wasn’t just The Rolling Stones. It wasn’t just The Beatles. It was Queen, and it was Bowie, and it was Kate Bush, serious British recording artists. I think David would have been like, ‘Oh my God, can you believe this? A serious country artist, Chris Young, is recording one of my songs. I’m really excited about this.’ ”
Though Bowie’s name has never appeared in a co-writing credit on a top 20 country single, he has subtly influenced the genre in the past. “Let’s Dance” was partial inspiration for a section in the album version of Brothers Osborne’s “Shoot Me Straight”; producer Jay Joyce (Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson) patterned the drum sound on Gary Allan’s “It Ain’t the Whiskey” after the tone on “Five Years,” the opening cut on Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust; Aaron Watson gave a shoutout to “Rebel Rebel” in “Outta Style”; and Eric Church mimicked the pitch-shifting vocal descent in Bowie’s “Fame” on his own “Creepin’.”
“It was weird,” Church said at the time. “There are some people out there, especially in the country genre, that didn’t understand what that [gimmick] was, but that’s exactly what it was.”
The Bowie interpolation might be very well-timed. Classic rock consumption is on the rise; country music recently had the top two songs on the Billboard Hot 100 — including Luke Combs’ cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” — and interpolations of Jo Dee Messina’s “Heads Carolina, Tails California” and Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” have led to recent successes for Cole Swindell and Jake Owen, respectively.
“The avant garde nature of a Bowie song is something that’s pretty adventuresome for [country],” suggests Mazza, “and I think it’s a really healthy idea in today’s world where there are no boundaries anymore.”
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