DONNA SUMMER – “I Feel Love”
One of the remarkable things about “I Feel Love” is that it still sounds futuristic now. Not because the effects and techniques it uses remain way ahead of what pop’s capable of, but because it helped fix the idea of what “the future” would sound like: its specific mix of voice and electronics evoking gleaming hedonism, endless clockwork pleasure. “I Feel Love”, like robots and spaceships on sci-fi magazine covers, represents a fixed future we can’t ever quite get past.
But at the same time “I Feel Love” is a thing very much of 1977 - its sounds and beats somehow antique, with the way its internal rhythms often seem to shift out of phase giving the track its mechanical feel. It’s the pop equivalent of Voyager (which launched within weeks of “I Feel Love”‘s release) - the furthest out we’ve ever gone, but powered by primitive late-70s kit.
Back on Earth “I Feel Love” has been refitted and retooled countless times – if not a remix then another track borrowing its pulsing bassline chassis. That’s testament to its success as a pop song as well as a machine age wonder: for all that Moroder’s innovative arrangement suits the tune’s spacey bliss and transforms Summer’s coo into something entranced, “I Feel Love” is still catchy enough to have worked as a much more trad disco or glam-pop record.
The arrangement is what shifts it from good to legendary, though, from the first interlock of bassline and synthesised pulsebeat. It’s Ptolemaic pop, the play of cycles and epicycles: Moroder setting up minutely intersecting circling rhythms and watching as they interact in a music of the spheres that hasn’t stopped turning yet.
9
Who could forget indeed?
The metallic clank of analogue sequencers, mechanised 4/4 drum beats, phased, synchopated hi-hats, swirling synths and effects – familiar enough now but in 1977 ? It wasn’t entirely without precedence though – Tangerine Dream, Can, Kraftwerk et al had been playing with sequencers & synths for years; as had the majority of prog rock bands. The difference here was employing it as a danceable solution (to teenage revolution ? – sorry). Well that and of course Donna’s sultry soulful vocals turning the automated pulse human. Previously heard being amalgamated into a warm discofied, funked up backdrop but now brought into sharp focus by the machines. Beauty & the Beast. It’s not really disco or funk it’s cold, calculating & warm & soothing and I know it’s a significant record but I just can’t love it as much as I’d like to. No, I actually prefer her/Moroders re-invention of Manilow’s ‘Could It Be Magic’ (album version not the castrated single version) from the previous year (which Take Fat would eventually bastardise) which I find a far more sensuous and enveloping record but that did nothing in the chart so what the hell do I know.
Re: Chris Spedding – still touring with Roxy Music & Bryan Ferry (it all fits !) – he also featured on Ferry’s 1976 version of ‘Let’s Stick Together’.
According to the listeners of BBC Radio 2, this is the second greatest dance record of all time (just ahead of “Sex Machine” and, OMGWTF, “Strings Of Life”).
To be fair, Donna’s “Could It Be Magic?” did manage to reach #40 in June 1976, but even Barry’s original didn’t chart in Britain until early 1979 (and Barry won’t be bothering us – at least not directly – on Popular either; much loved in the UK but saleswise predominantly an albums artist).
As for Radio 2 listeners – isn’t democracy a tad overrated (as great a record as the winner is, is it really a “dance” record?)? I don’t approve of the idea of a preordained shortlist but presumably that was a safeguard to ensure that something like “The Birdie Song” or “Agadoo” didn’t come top.
10. Key To My Happiness
- The Charades (1966)
uh, what?
Northern Soul guv.
Marcello @ 104: It all depends what you mean by “dance”. The notion of “dance” as a distinct genre of popular music comes after my pop time. For many of us wrinklies (who are alleged to form a large part of the Radio 2 audience but me being a cussed so-and-so I confine myself to radios 3 and 4 these days), the primary purpose of *all* popular music was dancing. We may raise eyebrows now that Rock Around The Clock was labelled a foxtrot, but then in 1955 a foxtrot is what would have been done to it in most dance halls where it was played.
Of course, it depends on what kind of dance you plan to do, how good a track is for dancing to. The top track in that list is a fabulous track for the leroc[*] dancing that was my chosen style before arthritic knees made it difficult. Tracks like I’m Not In Love or If You Leave Me Now are hopeless for leroc but great for smooching and that is also dancing. You can do a terrificly sexy salsa to Nina Simone’s My Baby Just Cares For Me. My absolute favourite track for lerocing to is was always Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark.
You can tell what a numpty I was when went into Virgin in Bristol in the early 90s looking for music to practice leroc to, and naively went to the section labelled ‘Dance’!
[*] Leroc is French jiving, that is 50s jiving modified for the less frenetic pop music of the sixties when partner dancing remained dominant while the anglo-saxon world moved away from it. Less flamboyant footwork, more sensuous arm and body movement. I for one regret the passing of partner dancing. It’s almost as if the world became afraid of intimacy.
None of this goes any way towards answering my query as to why that record in particular should be considered specifically as a “dance” record.
Duh! Because, as I said very clearly, it’s a cracking track to dance to. Which part of that don’t you understand, Marcello?
So are other records. But their embyronic generation is not in dance-intentional terms. It is not a dance record in the sense of “One More Time” or “Must Be Madison.”
More pressing: “Where Love Lives” by Alison Limerick wtf?
#108-110: No more discussion of that particular record please!
No issues at all with the deserved inclusion of “Where Love Lives” – an absolute classic, and one of those tracks that would always, always drag me onto the floor.
Without discussing any particular record, I continue to maintain that all pop music is, ipso fact, inteded at least in part for dancing to. Regardless either of whether it specifically alludes to a particular dance or of whether it falls into the genre known as “Dance” (much of which, it seems to me, is difficult to dance meaningfully to as it is devoid of any kind of emotion.)
Have you ever tried to dance to any “Dance” music Peggy?
Yes you’re on dangerous ground here Rosie – everyone who’s been to Poptimism will have seen Marcello glued to the dancefloor all night, glowstick aloft, teeth grinding, raving his bollocks off while the likes of Kat and Lex are forced into humiliating retreats.
I’ve no idea what the man’s on about; I’ve not been to Poptimism since February and categorically deny any glowstick (ab)use.
#106 yeah, but this got number 10 on a radio2 poll? How did that happen? I mean, I know a bit of NS but I don’t know this one. Should listen more, I guess…..
Maybe the panel of experts all brought different compilation CDs and they just picked the tenth track on each. It’s a good one, though, if very “token NS entry” in a non-poll like this.
what is meant by ‘dance meaningfully’?! i just dance meanly
emotional connections to “Dance” Music come all too easily for some of us
Bit late in the day but I’ve just seen the BBC’s ridiculous “Top Ten dance tracks” linked to on this thread.
Just the kind of pigs ear that you’d imagine the BBC would make of such a task. They might “get” rock but you just know when it comes to “dance” they might as well forget it…
Alison Limerick!? as someone said “WTF?!” – is it a coincidence that this figured high in the appalling ‘Mixmag”s top dance tracks from the mid-90s which they had temerity to bar readers from voting on. As I think I might have said before I can only think that a couple of their editorial staff came up on their first pills whilst this mediocre rubbish was being played one night as there’s no other reason for remembering it years later.
And I agree with the bewilderment about the Northern Soul track (owing to some friends who were Scooter Boys/Mods I like to think I have a pretty broad knowledge of NS and I’ve never even knowingly heard this track…did they pick it because in their ill-informed way they thought NS was ALL about obscurity so they went and picked a track that was pretty obscure even on the NS scene?
And why no hardcore/rave…?
well at least we should have been thankul for small mercies- I’d half thought that knowing the kind of people who come up with these things it’d be full of ‘student techno’ eg Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, Underworld, post-Firestarter Prodigy etc…
This is a stonewall 10 for me. A tune that can make you physically drop what you’re doing and listen and feel the groove and dance. Or at least jiggle about a bit and nod your head. In ’77 when this was #1 it was the start of the school hols. Quite a weird summer after the mad heatwave of ’76, with the Silver Jubilee fresh in everyone’s mind. The Sex Pistols and The Clash were not quite on my radar, although I was aware of them, but Donna Summer…WOW! This was like nothing I had heard before, a mesmerising single. Ahead of it’s time. Not really understanding why until much later. To me this felt like the start of something much more engaging than disco. A heart-pumping groove like rock but supersonically faster. Incredible. After that…nothing. No mad grooves, no thumping beats no spacey synths. Nobody picked up the baton and ran with it until 1987! Why?
Every commenter before me has given great insight into why this particular record is so groundbreaking and amazing, but I will still chime in for it. I Feel Love is my favorite pop single of all time. It’s all about the paradoxes of the song and production to me. The pulsating bassline and mechanized beats pointing towards the future of pop music, while it’s production clearly grounds it to the 70′s. The coldness of the music contrasting with Summer’s warm, sexy cooing of the lyrics. And I would hesitate to call them “lyrics”. More like fragments of an untapped wonder of senses. I Feel Love has always evoked images of a emotionless android awakening to sexual ecstasy, or the euphoric feeling of love. A thing of processed thoughts now for the first time feeling something new. Something that cannot be sent through a processor, but only felt through the body. The intertwining of sex and dance. A set in stone 10.
More on the extended Cowley remix. It was around in 1977, but as an unofficial bootleg rather than an official release, so I imagine that disco DJs, if not radio stations, would have given it plenty of airplay. It wasn’t given a ‘proper’ release until five years later, by which time Summer’s career had moved in a different direction and the commercial disco boom had long since gone bust.
Can anyone shed any light on why this wasn’t a 10?
OK – Really nothing new to add except to stress the contrast between Moroder’s robotic rhythmic grid and Summer’s breathy vocals that are both ethereal and sensual at once. It’s not really a disco track. It’s a Krautrock-Soul hybrid that was easily mistaken for a disco track.
I think it’s the greatest pop track ever bit each to their own.
Rather disappointing to see that only 75% of voters on Popular ’77 have given this a 6 or over. Clearly, not everyone here is as discerning as I thought…
worst news possible:
http://www.tmz.com/2012/05/17/donna-summer-dead-last-dance/
Awful news. The deaths of famous people don’t usually affect me but this is really saddening. I have so many personal memories associated with her music, all of them positive, and 63 just feels far too young.
I had no idea she was ill to be honest. And for that reason this news is somehow even more shocking than Whitney. Just very, very sad.
Very sad to lose such a beautiful voice. I’m shocked because IFL is high on my list of all-time faves.
Currently topping the ft reader scores chart with an AVERAGE of 9.4, with Beach boys 2nd at 9.05
That’s a clear lead
This seems appropriate…
http://youtu.be/lEV7TrhkZUk
As someone else said the deaths of famous people don’t usually affect them but this one did because her music was there at important times in their life.I agree completely. I didn’t even know she was ill so this is totally out of the blue. I haven’t felt so shocked since Michael Jackson passed away.
The first thing I thought of on hearing the news was that 9.4 reader score. That’s some testament.
I’m reading another long obituary thread at MetaFilter, where this comment in particular appealed. Another linked to Sound on Sound’s Classic Tracks dissection of IFL.
Yikes. Damn, she was in great voice (and basically looking great too) on Jools Holland’s show only a couple of years ago, e.g., here. Definitely made one think that it was insane that nobody from the electronic dance world had collaborated with her recently (I mean – really – what *has* William Orbit been doing the last ten years when he could have been working with DS?). The First Lady of electronic dance music absolutely.
Blondie doing I Feel Love (Live) in 1979.