Bye Bye Mon Cowboy

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“Bye Bye Mon Cowboy”

Single by Mitsou
from the album 'El Mundo'

Released

1988

Format

7" single

Recorded

1988

J.P. Isaac

Pierre Gendron and J.P. Isaac

Mitsou singles chronology

—

"Bye Bye Mon Cowboy"
(1988)

"Les Chinois"
(1989)

"Bye Bye Mon Cowboy" was the debut single from Québécoise pop star Mitsou in 1988 from her first album El Mundo. It was one of her biggest hits and the song she is most associated with. The song managed to break outside the francophone market of Quebec and went on to garner national Canadian top 40 radio and video airplay. This accomplishment is something that most Quebec pop stars have not achieved with their French-language songs, including Céline Dion.

While the lyrics were in French, it did contain several English words or words that could be easily understood by both an anglophone and a francophone audience: "bye bye", "cowboy", "gigolo", "rodeo".

The music video was a low budget effort that featured Mitsou singing the song in a club, interspersed with suggestive shots of her naked and holding cardboard rectangles over her private body parts.

The songs was later given a house music remix by Shep Pettibone and re-released for the US market in 1992 with a new video. The new video featured higher production values and included shots of Mitsou, dressed in a tight black dress, running about a city with shopping bags. These scenes were interspersed with scenes shot on a studio set made to look like a barn. Several muscular cowboys danced about her as she sang the song.

The song was subsequently re-recorded and remixed in 2002 for her club-oriented EP Vibe. It was released again as a single and received airplay in Québec.

Mitsou followed up the cowboy and western theme with the country-tinged ballad "Lettre à un cowboy" (1991) (on which she sings to a cowboy "je t'ai dit bye bye", which translates as "I said bye bye to you") as well as the EP and title track Heading West (1992).