Songfacts®:

• One of the most overtly sexual songs of the New Wave era, "Sex (I'm A...)" is a duet between Berlin lead singer Terri Nunn and her bandmate John Crawford. It's a musical lovemaking session with a dialogue between the two where Nunn lists her various roles (a goddess, a geisha, little girl) and Crawford retorts "I'm a man."
  
  The lyric was inspired by Nunn's relationship with the British DJ Richard Blade, who worked at the radio station KROQ in Los Angeles, where Berlin was based (no, they're not from Germany but they wanted a European-sounding name). They were dating when she wrote the song with Crawford and the band's guitarist, Dave Diamond. As Blade explains in his autobiography World In My Eyes, Nunn was into roleplay but he resisted, telling her, "I'm a man!"
• Terri Nunn and John Crawford were a very attractive couple and would get rather intimate when performing this song, but it was an act - they were never involved romantically (Nunn is indeed an actress - she was offered the role of Lucy Ewing on Dallas but turned it down so she could try her hand at music). In the video they share a smooch, but at concerts they would sometimes take it a further, with Crawford straddling Nunn during the musical interlude. They did this bit when they performed the song at the US Festival in 1983.
• Give Terri Nunn credit for unapologetically pushing sexual boundaries in this song at a time when it opened her up to criticism and risked overshadowing her talents. This was 1982, two years before Madonna went that route with "Like A Virgin." Nunn, who was 23 at the time, had the confidence to pull it off; she had been in the entertainment industry for a while by this point, with various TV acting roles as a teenager. When asked about the sexual nature of the band's music and lifestyle, she leaned into it, saying, "Sex is part of our repertoire, both personally and professionally."
• Berlin were big fans of the producer Giorgio Moroder, and on this song, John Crawford created the bassline by inverting the one on the Moroder-produced 1975 Donna Summer hit "Love To Love You Baby." That very lascivious song was in many ways the forebear to "Sex (I'm A...)," and the band has acknowledged its influence.
  
  Moroder came into their lives when he produced their 1984 song "No More Words." That led to Terri Nunn singing on "Take My Breath Away," a song Moroder wrote for the movie Top Gun. That song was credited to Berlin and became by far their biggest hit, but Nunn is the only group member that contributed to it.
• The song is part of Berlin's second album, Pleasure Victim, released in 1982. That album is their first with Terri Nunn on vocals - their 1980 debut had a different singer.
  
  Pleasure Victim was released on a local Los Angeles label called M.A.O. Records, which issued the first single, "The Metro," at the end of 1981. That song seemed stalled on the tracks until it found a champion in Richard Blade, who played it on KROQ. It was during this time that Blade met Terri Nunn through the station.
  
  Exposure on KROQ helped Berlin secure a deal with Geffen Records, which re-released the album in 1983 and issued "Sex (I'm A...)" as the first single - a bold choice engineered to create a buzz. With support from Blade and KROQ, the song rose to #62 in March 1983. "The Metro" was the next Geffen single; it went to #58 in July.
• Understandably, most radio stations refused to play this song, not just because because of the heavy breathing, but also because Berlin was new to the game and their New Wave sound was just starting to catch on.
  
  It's long been a strategy for bands to release a controversial song and use it as a marketing opportunity when it gets "banned" - The Police did this with "Roxanne." It helps if an antagonist emerges to decry the song, and that happened with "Sex (I'm A...)" when a priest in San Diego railed against it.
  
  "It was the best thing that ever happened to us," Terri Nunn told Classic Pop. "He ran a local commercial in San Diego admonishing the community for having us play, because we had written this song and we were the Devil's children. It was a 9,000-capacity venue and after the ad went out, it sold out in two hours."
• When Berlin play family-friendly venues like Disney parks, they do a clean version of "Sex (I'm A...)" that deftly removes any offensive language. The line "we make love together" becomes "we have fun together."
• Berlin released a new version of the song on their 2019 album Transcendance, their first album with John Crawford in the lineup since 1986.