"Like the multi-color coat, I'm multi-dimensional."
May 17, 2012 9:34 AM Subscribe
"That was Marilyn Monroe singing, not me. I'm an actress. That's why my songs are diverse." That was Donna Summer talking about her breakthrough hit, "Love to Love You Baby," which launched a career that helped define pop music in the mid-1970s through the early 1980s. She has died today, of breast cancer, at age 63.
Most "serious" publications treated "Love to Love You Baby" as a novelty when it was released in 1975. Rolling Stone didn't review the single or the LP. Robert Christgau dismissed the record with three sentences: "Did you come yet? Huh? Did you come yet?" Other critics sniffed that the record was "packaged aural sex" or "erotic Muzak." (Read excellent Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture for deeper detail.)
Yet it's hard to overstate the influence of disco and Donna Summer on pop music, then and now. During the period from 1976 to 1979, disco was an inescapable part of life both in the United States and abroad. Life Magazine estimated that at one point in the United States during this period 20 discotheques were opening a week. But the backlash arrived just as quickly as the trend wave. About the same time that Donna Summer released Hot Stuff, which some critics have called her best album, protests were being lodged by listeners to rock stations because they were playing tracks from a disco diva.
What people don't remember about Summer was that she was ambivalent, and more so as time went on, about the record's success. She was a born-again Christian who became instantly identified with a genre that had been launched into the stratosphere by a single that consisted of Giorgio Moroder's icy keyboards backing what Time Magazine counted as 22 orgasmic groans. "You have to get people's attention some kind of way," she told Ebony in October 1977, "but I'm not just sex, sex, sex."
"Love to Love You Baby."
"I Feel Love."
"Hot Stuff."
"Bad Girls."
"The Wanderer."
"Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger)."
"She Works Hard for the Money."
Most "serious" publications treated "Love to Love You Baby" as a novelty when it was released in 1975. Rolling Stone didn't review the single or the LP. Robert Christgau dismissed the record with three sentences: "Did you come yet? Huh? Did you come yet?" Other critics sniffed that the record was "packaged aural sex" or "erotic Muzak." (Read excellent Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture for deeper detail.)
Yet it's hard to overstate the influence of disco and Donna Summer on pop music, then and now. During the period from 1976 to 1979, disco was an inescapable part of life both in the United States and abroad. Life Magazine estimated that at one point in the United States during this period 20 discotheques were opening a week. But the backlash arrived just as quickly as the trend wave. About the same time that Donna Summer released Hot Stuff, which some critics have called her best album, protests were being lodged by listeners to rock stations because they were playing tracks from a disco diva.
What people don't remember about Summer was that she was ambivalent, and more so as time went on, about the record's success. She was a born-again Christian who became instantly identified with a genre that had been launched into the stratosphere by a single that consisted of Giorgio Moroder's icy keyboards backing what Time Magazine counted as 22 orgasmic groans. "You have to get people's attention some kind of way," she told Ebony in October 1977, "but I'm not just sex, sex, sex."
"Love to Love You Baby."
"I Feel Love."
"Hot Stuff."
"Bad Girls."
"The Wanderer."
"Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger)."
"She Works Hard for the Money."
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posted by blucevalo at 9:35 AM on May 17, 2012