Donna Summer

Donna Summer is remembered as the queen of disco, and she was, crown and all. But pigeonholing her there means missing the greatest thing she did, which was not reigning over a passing fashion but inventing the sound of the next fifty years. In 1977, with a song called "I Feel Love", Donna Summer and her producer Giorgio Moroder built the entire future of dance music. Everything that came afterwards —techno, house, electronic music, every club in the world to this day— is born there. The queen of disco was, in truth, the mother of something far bigger.

The song that came from tomorrow

To grasp the size of "I Feel Love" you have to imagine how everything else sounded in 1977: orchestras, strings, brass, flesh-and-blood musicians. And then suddenly this song appears, made almost entirely with a synthesiser, a hypnotic, repetitive electronic pulse, cold and sexual at the same time, with Donna Summer's voice floating above it like a ghost. It did not sound like its own era. It sounded like a future that did not yet exist.

The story goes that Brian Eno came running into the studio where David Bowie was recording with the single in his hand, saying he had heard the sound of the future, that this song was going to change dance music forever. He was right. "I Feel Love" is, for many people, the starting point of all modern electronic music. Donna Summer did not follow a trend: she opened one that lasts to this day.

Much more than one song

And it was not only that one. Donna Summer strung together a run of hits that made her the definitive voice of an era: "Hot Stuff", "Bad Girls", "Last Dance", "MacArthur Park", "She Works Hard for the Money". She had an enormous voice, capable of the sensual whisper and of powerful gospel, and a presence that dominated the dance floor effortlessly. She was the first artist to place several consecutive double albums at the top of the charts, something not even the biggest rock stars managed.

"She Works Hard for the Money", moreover, showed her in full: an anthem to working women, to the ones who break their backs for very little, sung by someone who knew where she came from. Behind the queen of disco glamour there was a woman with a consciousness of class and of gender, who gave a voice to the women nobody was singing about.

What to remember

Donna Summer was the queen of disco, yes, but her greatest crown is another one: with "I Feel Love", in 1977, she and Giorgio Moroder invented the mould for all the electronic dance music that came afterwards. She strung hit after hit together with a powerful, versatile voice, broke records the rock stars could not reach, and sang about working women while being one of them. She died in 2012, at sixty-three, of cancer.

Remember it like this: they called her the queen of a fashion many had given up for dead, and it turned out she had founded the sound of the future. Every time an electronic beat plays on any dance floor on the planet, there it still is, the pulse she lit first.

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Sources

Donna Summer (LaDonna Adrian Gaines), American singer born on 31 December 1948 in Boston and died on 17 May 2012, at the age of sixty-three, of lung cancer. Known as "the queen of disco", her song "I Feel Love" (1977), produced by Giorgio Moroder on an entirely electronic base, is widely regarded as a foundational starting point of modern electronic dance music. Among her many hits are "Love to Love You Baby", "Hot Stuff", "Bad Girls", "Last Dance", "MacArthur Park" and "She Works Hard for the Money". She was the first artist to place several consecutive double albums at the top of the American charts and won several Grammy awards. David Bowie has its own profile in this series. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. The anecdote about Brian Eno and David Bowie regarding "I Feel Love" is widely circulated. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, Rolling Stone, NPR, Giorgio Moroder (official site) and other coverage.