Donna Summer – I Feel Love
Donna Summer is the undisputed queen of disco – no mean feat in a genre that’s crammed with soulful divas. She showed amazing longevity for a genre that produced a flurry of one-hit wonders and very few acts that could stand in the spotlight for more than a few months at a time. Only the Bee Gees were able to string together a disco career that challenged Summer’s superiority.
For many people, Donna Summer is disco, and with good reason. Many of the hallmarks of the genre started – or were perfected – by her. She has a great voice, and used to sing gospel (like many of that era’s leading lights), but she brought a delicious sultriness and sensuality to her vocal performances that perfectly encapsulated the disco era. The cornerstone of her career, and the blueprint for hundreds of singles that followed, was the 17-minute long track, Love to Love You Baby, a recasting of the Gainesborough/Birkin softcore classic, Je T’aime…Moi Non Plus (also covered by Barry Adamson on his The Negro Inside Me EP). Basically an extended orgasm over a disco beat, Love to Love You Baby was a huge worldwide hit, and set the disco mood perfectly. After all, that’s basically what disco was all about, a four-on-the-floor beat as a prelude to and soundtrack for sex. The original recording was of a reasonable and fairly standard length, but the producer, European synth-whiz Giorgio Moroder, remixed it, providing one of the first examples of that art as well.
After that, Summer’s career blasted off and burned bright for many years. She also set a number of records with her records. She was the first female artist to hit number one three times with three different songs in the same calendar year (MacArthur Park, Bad Girls, and Hot Stuff), and the first artist to release three consecutive number one double albums (okay, that last one is stretching it a bit – how many artist have released three consecutive double albums anyway?).
Most of her material follows the standard disco formula, with swooping strings and cheesy electronic percussion and way too much sizzle and barely any steak. In general, the disco aesthetic featured far too much cheese for me to comfortably stomach. It probably sounds great when you’re stuffed to the gills with cocaine and having sex with Brooke Shields in the women’s room of Studio 54, but that was never my scene. There was one notable exception to Summer’s formula, and it turned out to be one of the most important and influential tracks in the history of recorded music. I know I tend towards hyperbole – all critics do – but that is no lie. Much of what happened in the ‘80s and ‘90s and beyond can be directly traced back to this one track, 1977’s I Feel Love.
I Feel Love is proto-electronica. It was the first hit to have an entirely synthetic background and to prove the value of synthesizers as more than just a little spice to be thrown on top of a more traditionally arranged track. By using a modulating Moog sequence as the base (very difficult to record, apparently, as it kept drifting out of synch), I Feel Love opened the doors to techno. Now, this wasn’t anything that Kraftwerk wasn’t already doing – they had long championed entirely synthetic tracks, from the bass to the beats to the melodies that floated on top – but the difference was Summer’s passionate vocals, in contrast to Kraftwerk’s icily detached robotics, and it was that tension, that striking contrast, that made it a worldwide smash hit.
Surprisingly few disco artists picked up on this combination, which is why almost the entire genre is uninteresting to me. The only two other disco tracks that I’ve heard that really exploited synthesizers are Lipps, Inc.’s Funkytown and Amii Stewart’s cover of Eddie Floyd’s Knock on Wood – both one hit wonders (which may be why nobody else followed that formula). Rumor has it that Brian Eno, harbinger of cool, heard I Feel Love when it was released in Germany, where he was either working on his final “rock” album (Before and After Science) or finishing up his critically lauded trilogy with David Bowie. After hearing I Feel Love, Eno walked into the studio and announced that he had just heard the future of music. And, goddamn him if he wasn’t right. Again.