If Donna Summer had just the one titanic single 37 years ago, her place in the musical firmament would be assured. “Love to Love You Baby” did so much: it made her the top draw on Casablanca Records (a relationship that saw her become the only artist to take three straight double LPs to the top of the chart), it popularized the 12-inch format, and it reintroduced female ecstasy as a viable sonic force.
But she did more, of course. One of her many gifts was the ease with which she responded to the material at hand. As has been noted, her career can practically be divided into two eras. The first would be the gusty, folklike distillation on worldbeating singles and albums like “I Feel Love,” “Could It Be Magic” and Four Seasons of Love. With a new pop era came a new approach: the intoxicating assertion that charged productions like “Hot Stuff,” “Bad Girls,” and “Love Is in Control”. It wasn’t a rigid division, of course: Donna Summer was too good to ever narrow the transmission.
With Summer’s passing, more than a few prominent voices have registered their anger at her exclusion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It seems the Hall will make atonement, but the museum treatment is so much less than she’s earned. Like the best of her peers, Donna Summer served the songs, and the songs are now ours. Here are just a few of them.
Jonathan Bogart on “Love to Love You Baby”
Eros is an untamed beast, and eroticism remains one of the hardest aesthetic tropes to grapple with precisely because no two people experience it in exactly the same way. For all the sniggering orgasm counts (twenty-two! no, mate, twenty-three!) and half-voyeuristic, half-scandalized backstories about orgies at Neil Bogart’s pad, there’s the unspoken but ever-increasing possibility that “Love to Love You Baby” doesn’t come off as erotic at all, that modern listeners hear not sexuality but camp, not eros but chintz. The feather-haired sexual liberation of the ’70s doesn’t need the intervention of the AIDS-panicked ’80s to feel silly today — just the fact that forty years has passed is enough.
But this is where music — pure sound — has the advantage over the erotic cinema of the period, whether “artsy” Euro stuff like Emmanuelle or American sleaze like Deep Throat and all its descendents: unencumbered by the explicitly visual changes in fashion, grooming, gender presentation, or mood lighting, music can be about pleasure divorced even from physicality, pure abstraction. And of course that’s what “Love to Love You Baby” is: Donna Summer experienced no orgasms during its recording (and it wouldn’t matter to us if she had; nobody, least of all a listener, can experience another person’s orgasms), but that doesn’t mean all that moaning was wasted.
Rather than performing sexuality for us, and turning the listener into a voyeur (as Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin did on “Je t’aime… moi non plus”), she’s responding organically, giving us a path into experiencing the music. Her voice is the only one we hear (multiplied, toward the end, to form a horny chorus), which might suggest masturbation; but the way the music moves beneath her suggests that sound, not any flesh-and-blood lover, is her unwearying, infinitely patient partner. The rising and swirling strings echo her cascading waves of pleasure, and the sinuous bassline does all the thrusting necessary. Even the rising synthesizer sound in the second half intimates new patterns of pleasure, the technological orgasms of the future that will eventually require no body at all.
Edward Okulicz on “Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger)”
“Love is in Control” lacks the easy eroticism of most of Summer’s disco classics, but what it lacks in real sex it makes up for in audacity. Quincy Jones was the early-80s go-to guy for taking the intent of disco and doing commercially-palatable things without it being disco. Summer never had Michael Jackson’s ear for a bassline, but she sounds comfortable riding a gonzo mashup of saxophone and vocoders that pick up the slack of the bass and turn it into something that could have been Lady Gaga 25 years before the fact.
And then there’s her voice, an underrated and versatile instrument. Though remembered for the cool, sensuous “I Feel Love” at one end of the spectrum, and the practically hi-NRG “She Works Hard for the Money” at the other, in the middle she could belt and yelp like an Italo-house diva and inhabit the ridiculous. She didn’t write this one and certainly doesn’t bother trying to sell it emotionally (as when she put the lie to Giorgio Moroder being robot music), but Summer knew that contrast had its time and place, and that time was seldom the same time as Disco Time. If your song is cluttering and rhythmically lumbering, you might as well sound half-excited and half-drunk over it. She knew there was more than one way to get you to get up and dance. And if your song is just a collection of fanciful sounds, Summer knew the best thing to do was be one of them. Her post-70s oeuvre is full of endearingly odd nuggets and between this and her last commercial hurrah (“This Time I Know It’s For Real”), Donna Summer dipped into unsubtle, unclassy dance pop, made it pleasurable and never besmirched her golden reputation no matter how hard she tried. She really was just that good.
Alfred Soto on “I Do Believe I Fell in Love”
It begins with an electric piano playing a chordal pattern endemic to lots of early eighties El Lay confessional moments, but Donna Summer – belting at the top of her register on one of her few self-written songs – administers a jolt of eros. The odd point is the middle eight, in which she and producer Michael Omartian pile multitracked Summer over Summer in an effect as eerie as period Kate Bush; the triumph is the outro, a return to her roots in arpeggiated electronics, bolstered now by piano and drums as Summer repeats the chorus as if willing herself to believe a sentiment she has nevertheless transfigured into pure agape. As the last track on She Works Hard For the Money, it’s an appropriate end to an album that is as close to a song cycle about a contemporary woman as the eighties could conceive.
Mallory O’Donnell on Four Seasons of Love
Disco (both before and after we called it that) would seem to be the perfect medium for albums. After all, when one song slides so effortlessly into another to create a continuous experience, why not extend the idea to encompass both sides of an album and bring the dancefloor to your home. Or bedroom. Some American artists experimented with this notion (most notably Gloria Gaynor) but it was really Europe that took the idea to its logical conclusion, constructing single- and double-album disco symphonies based on Greek mythology or Romeo & Juliet or the impending mutated animal apocalypse or what have you (yes, these are all real albums). In Donna Summer, co-conspirators Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte found a perfect vocalist to bring an American sound and thematic material to the kind of side- and album-long musical suites Eurodisco was twirling its baton around circa 1975 and ’76.
Nearly every album the Donna team released in this decade was a conceptual setpiece, though the concepts themselves might drift from vague (A Love Trilogy) to precise (I Remember Yesterday, in which “I Feel Love” posits and delivers The Future) to silly (Once Upon a Time). All were successful to varying degrees, but Four Seasons of Love was perhaps the most successful and certainly the most succinct. Four seasons, four stages of Love, beginning with a “Spring Affair” and ending with a partner-less lover contemplating a tragic “Winter Melody.” Each tune captures the mood of its respective season precisely. “Spring Affair” comes on in suspiciously “Love to Love You Baby” fashion, but is sprightly and casual where the other is languid and sensual. “Summer Fever” is a stiffer prescription: more bracing, anticipating the funkier, slower boogie sound many years away, and rife with tempo changes and orchestral flourishes redolent of Isaac Hayes. The key track is “Autumn Changes,” melodic and symphonic in an almost Motown style but undercut with strange and moving passages, mood shifts and Caribbean exotica. The production style is more typically Euro than the former tracks, but Donna’s vocal is so deftly balanced between positivity and disillusionment than even the likes of an Alec R. Costandinos couldn’t have screwed it up. “Winter Melody” literally comes in on a cold wind and reminds us that the real pain is yet to come. But in this case it’s a pain that is an ease to accept: heartache rarely sounds like something you want to soak your feet in while you have a nice cocktail, but it does here. Finally, “Spring Affair” comes in for a reprise, reminding you that behind the loss of one lover lies the promise of another.
Or something like that, anyway. I won’t pretend that Four Seasons of Love is some kind of disco House of Leaves, but as far as creating a narrative across actually-danceable, melodic, beautifully-sung tracks, you could do a whole lot worse. And for what it’s worth, nearly every other of Donna Summer’s ’70s concept albums is at least solid and enjoyable from start to finish. In a genre dominated by amazing singles and unlistenable albums, that kind of run isn’t so much respectable as it is remarkable. And beyond all the loose concepts and thematically-linked string noodling lies the sensibility of an amazing singer and performer shrugging off the sex kitten sobriquet with aplomb, produced by an able team who knew when to tie the threads together and when to just get out of the way. Four Seasons shows more of the latter – Donna takes over these tracks and turns them into something well beyond a corny concept and a softcore foldout art sleeve. She turned – she turns them – into actual songs with naked, honest emotion brimming over, transforming the proceedings from loose concept into full-blown theme. Rare in any genre.
Sally O’Rourke on “On the Radio”
As the ‘80s approached and disco reached a saturation point, Donna Summer paused to reflect on the decade she had helped define. “On the Radio,” like its immediate predecessor “No More Tears (Enough is Enough),” starts as a lavish ballad reminiscent of her early ’70s career in musical theater, then surges into the sort of floorfiller that made her a star. Summer co-wrote the song with Giorgio Moroder for the coming-of-age film Foxes, where it recurred as a nostalgic theme signifying the end of childhood. “On the Radio” marked a transitional point for Summer as well. It’s the last single she cut for Casablanca Records, and the end of her classic disco era. Summer begins the song in a state of melancholy as she thinks back on a past love. When she hears an anonymous radio dedication accompanying “their song,” she convinces herself that he’s sending her a message. This perceived declaration of love sweeps her out of her languor, propelling her into a pulsating dancefloor fantasy.
“On the Radio” isn’t just the story of love regained, though. More than that, it’s a tribute to the power of pop: how a certain song can transport you to another emotional state; how music can express the way you feel when “you couldn’t find the words to say it yourself”; how the radio is always there for you when you need it. (On the long version of the song, Summer even sings “the only friend I know is my radio” during the fadeout.) Radio is both communal and deeply personal. Even when you’re listening alone, thousands of others are receiving the same signals. Even when the songs seem to be speaking directly to you, they’re a sign that someone else understands. “Tune right in, you may find the love you lost,” Summer sings in the last verse. It’s a sentiment familiar to anyone who’s empathized with her anthems to yearning, took pleasure in the lush power of her voice, and found joy in dancing to her songs.
Jer Fairall on “Last Dance”
If hearing “Last Dance” in the immediate wake of Donna Summer’s passing doesn’t feel quite as devastating as it perhaps should, it probably owes much to the fact that it has been far too long since the song could be heard as anything but elegiac. Debuting in 1978 (originally as the showcase of the execrable discosploitation comedy Thank God It’s Friday, for which it at least collected an Oscar for Best Original Song), only one year before the infamous Disco Demolition Night all but signaled the Death of Disco, the song’s titular sentiment was rendered instantly relevant in the face of a backlash – rooted in homophobia, racism and rockism – powerful enough to kill one of the most socially progressive and inclusive popular music genres in the history of such things. As disco went on to be recast, too few years later, as the party that came to an abrupt halt when the AIDS epidemic cruelly struck down an entire culture at the dawn of its liberation, the song gained an additional layer of bitter poignancy (with Summer herself possibly playing into the narrative with alleged homophobic comments made during her born-again days, moving from something like a den mother to Church Lady in tune with the times). Read “Last Dance” now as the front bookend to Cher’s “Believe,” widely interpreted as the post-AIDS anthem (and from another diva with a complicated history with the gay community), and it feels happily oblivious, blissfully unaware of all that the following thirty-some years of history were going to claim from its fleeting dance floor utopia. “Last Dance” sounds to me — has always sounded to me — as a nostalgia-etched dream of a better world that only barely got to exist, at the mercy of a future that has now claimed Donna Summer as its latest victim.
John Seroff on “She Works Hard for the Money”
When I was about seven, my mother came to me and said that she was going to become a nurse. She would have to go back to school for a few years and she would have fewer hours to spend with me and my sister but it was money that the family needed and it was going to make all our lives better. Could I, she asked, tell her that this was okay with me? Children are innately truthful and selfish; I said no. Mom enrolled in classes anyway and the room I already shared with my sister soon doubled as her study. I would lie on the floor with a Dungeons and Dragons handbook or a stack of comics while she commandeered my bed as a desk, occasionally having me quiz her on organ placement, drug interactions or the scientific names of bones. We’d play pop radio or television in the background. It was the early eighties and America’s boomer women were normalizing a female workplace on top 40 and primetime. “She Works Hard for The Money” was among my mother’s favorite songs in her first year of nursing school and it’s not hard to imagine she empathized with its message. Summer’s voice is more or less the saving grace of “She Works Hard”; the production has aged badly and the hammering motif loses its charm fast. Donna’s voice maintains power through it all: brassier than the brass and effortlessly direct. Summer was a great storyteller; displaying every word and intention more like an actress than a singer. It would be twenty-plus more years before I heard Donna Summer’s seminal Moroder tracks and several years beyond that until I bought into her as an important musician. My dad stepped up his game around the house, my sister and I were fine and my mom graduated to the strains of “The Greatest Love of All” before it became a cliché. She and Donna kept working hard.
Katherine St Asaph on “I Will Go with You (Con te partirò)”
Donna Summer, someone once best known for recording 22 fake orgasms alongside a sequencer getting its own jollies, also recorded this, a cover of arguably the most iconic song from a genre once introduced as such: “Has Josh Groban ever had sex? Does he even think about it?” If original “Con te partirò / Time to Say Goodbye” vocalists Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman escaped such commentary, it’s only because the genre wasn’t yet codified in the mid-’90s. Summer’s version isn’t just competent but remarkably faithful, the house beat and her R&B inflections the only novelties in a cover that retains some original Italian lyrics, orchestral underpinnings and, as the final note, a high, sustained cadenza that dares you to describe it as “operatic.” Summer’s track went to No. 1 on the dance charts, so clearly others heard nothing strange in it. But strange it is, even considering the decades-old tradition of divas tackling divas – a theatrical tradition Summer had indulged with and without Streisand – and even considering Summer had by then undergone a conversion to Christianity so thorough it came with a press scandal.
Brightman probably didn’t find it so strange. She’d certainly have no right to call disco strange; she had a fairly substantial career with the stuff, beginning with the gonzo Star Wars alien-sex takeoff “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper,” ending with double nuptials to Andrew Lloyd Webber and the British tabloids, and releasing some surprisingly solid work in between. (“Action Man,” in particular, could be a long-lost Summer single.) She’d also recognize the particulars of Summer’s backstory, having a career and connections as a German expatriate (her B-sides include a cover of Culture Beat and Kim Sanders’ “Pay No Mind”) and having been muse to a megaproducer – Frank Peterson instead of Summer’s Giorgio Moroder.
But Brightman, unlike Summer, almost completely abandoned disco, and Bocelli, though the thought is hilarious, never took it up. And neither quite explains why Summer would foray into classical crossover, a genre whose devotees are notoriously persnickety about musical and vocal merits – perhaps as a response to opera purists, who are persnickety about them. It’s easy to see, though, how a genre based on classic theater would appeal to Summer, whose “Love to Love You Baby” pants were pantomimes of Marilyn Monroe and whose back catalogue contains Broadway-like works old and new. And as a vocalist, Summer is absolutely qualified. Summer’s merits as a vocalist (the singing, not the SFX sort) are obvious but constantly downplayed; even avowed fans will more readily praise Moroder’s clattering latticework on “I Feel Love” than anything Summer contributes. This is hardly surprising, a combination of racism, sexism, rockism and that fetid mélange of the three that makes people do things like stage bonfires of any record not visibly made by a white guy with a guitar.
It’s a brave move, then, on Summer’s part: claiming her place in a genre that’s too often happy to welcome divas if they discard the inconvenient pop they make, and claiming her influence on its sound. Disco’s hardly alone here; like adult contemporary or its close neighbor new age, it’s an omnivorous genre, distilling the softest sounds and largest lifts and most hypnotic beats from dance and folk and theater and world music. The less charitable way to phrase this, though, is that the genre whitewashes everything: producing not passion but bowdlerization, not theater but gesturing, not folk but fake books and not world music but cultural appropriation, presided over as usual by a bunch of European people. This is a generalization, but it’s more fair than not. Summer probably knew this. She also probably knew that the best way to destroy a meme is to prove it so wrong nobody’d dare contradict the evidence. And so she does, writing lyrics like a genre pro, towering above a dance beat she doesn’t even consider apologizing for, and by her final note – piercing, and loud, and unfuckwithable — becoming invincible.
Alex Ostroff on “Sunset People”
“I Feel Love” was Donna’s great leap forward, all minimal Kraftwerk loops and longing, but “Sunset People,” the final track on Bad Girls, integrated the synthesizer lessons into a maximalist disco groove. The song is all glamour, with just a hint of seediness creeping out from underneath. Sunglasses and tinted windows hide scars, and the people act out the same tableau night after night because the only way you can make it last is if you never pause long enough to let the music stop and see things in light of day. Basically, this is the thematic godmother of every Ke$ha song ever (but especially “Shots on the Hood of My Car”) and you all know how I feel about this whole end-of-the-world sadness-on-the-dancefloor thing. “Sunset People” isn’t her best song, but if, per everything written about her, Donna Summer acted through her singing, this is the one track that feels least self-conscious in its assumption of a character. This lovely little third-person escapist disco fantasy somehow lets her cut straight through to the heart of the song without having to become anyone else.
Mallory O’Donnell on “Hot Stuff”
Shorn of the blues dominatrix vocal, “Hot Stuff” is some strange Italian stuff indeed. Minus a couple of bones thrown to American rock radio (bones thrown hard enough to land it the first ever Best Female Rock Performance Grammy), it’s an awesomely generic Italo tune, the kind you would expect to find on YouTube at 3 in the morning performed by some one-record band with an extraneous consonant. Kickdrum stiffer than a week-old turd? Cyborg bass? Batshit Gypsy syn-string? It’s got ’em all. But what makes the song so distinctly American isn’t the studio-rock slick sheen or the studiously average “Skunk” Baxter guitar solo, it’s the way in which Donna delivers urgency, sexuality and – above all else – control. She wants hot stuff, she actually claims to need hot stuff, but if your hot stuff doesn’t qualify then she will goddamn well get herself some of that other hot stuff that’s out there, somewhere. “I dialed about a hundred numbers baby/I’m bound to find somebody home” might read promiscuous and daring, but it leaves no doubt about who’s performing the hot action and who’s in control of the hot situation. “Tonight!”
Anthony Easton on “Cats Without Claws”
The first-year crit of Summer depends on if you are queer or hung around queers vs. being more square; it argues her as a diva, and as a queen of disco. The sophomore crit of Summer is that her work was not only disco, but that it gave birth to house and house’s children. The music from Munich moved to Berlin, and the music from Berlin moved to London, and so that mix of extended beats, of repeating loops, abstracted vocals that hinted at (or directly stated) a variety of pleasures, would allow for the children of the discotheque to last longer, to conquer in an Oedipal way.
Summer – living in Munich, choosing the producers, having hits throughout Europe – was a brasher, more American version of her descendents: a more sophisticated, less Eurotrash version of Amanda Lear. I keep thinking about Lear when I listen to 70s Summer, because even with her connections and jetsetting Lear only ever had one trick – she replaced the extreme sentiment of schlager with a decadent, lonely irony – irony that sought desperately for kitsch, and refused to settle for camp.
Summer was never sentimental, never cared about it. She never dropped names. For a music that was supposed to be about camp or kitsch, she refused both – yet her mechanical precision was not cold, and did not have the narratives of isolation or failed desire that often marked the Munich sound.
So Lear on one side, and Summer on the other. After Summer returns to America (because it was not only the Euro-dance she re-worked), you hear her in the vogue scenes in New York, in the Kraftwerk-infected parties in Detroit, in Grace Jones and her deconstructions of Caribbean rhythm, and even in KLF’s reworking of Tammy Wynette (who summarizes one version of this narrative when she sings: “They called me up in Tennessee/They said ‘Tammy, stand by The Jams’/But if you don’t like what they’re going to do/You better not stop them ’cause they’re coming through”).
I think about all of this when I listen to “Cats Without Claws”. The introductory lyrics re-introduce the isolation. They seem to explain that she seeks a kind of retreat, it becomes a song against fame, and that mainline she talks about is the line between Munich and New York; between Europe and New York. (The most revelatory thing in Keith Haring’s diaries is how dull the airplane rides are, and how they refuse a settling down – glamour turns grey with a shocking amount of ease.) But what’s interesting about “Cats Without Claws” is how much more engaged it is. It does not have the glamour of Tennessee being beckoned to London, it does not have the greyness of Haring’s constant travel, it does not have the sangfroid of Lear, and is not as precise as her Moroder work. This sincerity through attaching oneself to a multiphasic narrative seems important. The cats “harmonizing on the mainline” in the company of a “Joe Serpentine,” without reason or cause, that cause her never to be herself – is this a narrative that explains the decades in Nashville?
The track combines a elegant sprechgesang that must have been learnt in Munich, but with a chorus American in its excess. It constructs meaning by adding layers, meanings, sound effects; the production refuses the minimal stripping of her earlier work – it is angry, but an anger contained in an emotional schmaltz, something that is nothing if not American, and nothing if not Southern, so Southern it reminds one of late-period Elvis. While Lear spent the ‘80s and ‘90s working on ironic distance and softcore porn, hosting talk shows in France and Italy, Summer returned to America, and made one of her last significant works against the loucheness that she learned earlier.
Josh Langhoff on “Love’s Unkind”
“Love to Love You Baby” proved Summer wasn’t a schoolkid, yet here she is in “Love’s Unkind,” trapped in a doomed love triangle, pondering the titular “advice” of her fatalist Mama, and working really hard to remind us where she’s singing – schoolyard, schoolbell, hallway, class, everything but a fight in the cafeteria. A total genre exercise, in other words: idealizing not just broken hearts but school, the place where broken hearts first happen. Even so, “Unkind” remains the second most vibrant song (after “I Feel Love”) on I Remember Yesterday. Thank drummer Keith Forsey and saxman Dino Solera, whose parts are as busy and aggressive as the E Street Band’s concurrent genre exercises. But mostly thank Summer/Moroder/Bellotte, whose rewrite of “Then He Kissed Me” keeps the riff and the chords, derived from the blues but forsaking blue notes in favor of forthright diatonic brightness. Especially if you hear it right after the Copa swing of “I Remember Yesterday”, “Unkind” reminds you how explosive the Crystals must’ve sounded back in the day; it also reminds you how often Summer/Moroder/Bellotte equaled the Spector factory.
Brad Shoup on “Cold Love”
It’s just fucking bananas. this alkali-dry cod-rock chugger. The immortal combo of Pete Bellotte, Keith Forsey, and Harold Faltermeyer – that’s right, the Fletch guy – works up the “Black or White” riff a full decade before Mike. Underneath, Jeff Baxter pinches off chintzy funk rhythm guitar, soon to be transmuted into a glorious stainless-steel solo, clipped and polished within an inch of its life. And Donna? She runs through her lines like Chris Walken, hoovering the gated, clodding snare hits, Carmen Grillo’s Steinman-worthy (and excellent!) background vocals, and any sense that walking the line or cold loves or forgetting all the rest could be anything other than phonemic debris to triumph over. It’s a smash, proof that art is 25% form, 15% craftsmanship, and 300% whatever the hell you choose to do with it. Donna chose to swing it around and throw it over her shoulder. I choose to air this tune out somewhere with flailing room.
Jonathan Bogart on “I Feel Love”
Throb and hum, pulse and vibration: even the words we might use to describe Moroder’s sequencer patterns are intrinsically sexualized. Summer no longer needs the hammy theatricality of heavy breathing and kittenish moans; her singing voice quivers on the extremest high pitch of erotic sensation, climax indefinitely prolonged. The infinite remixes which looping electronics allow can convert it into the banality of the tantric, but the original 12″ mix, at only eight minutes and change, still sounds like an ever-nearing future.