DONNA SUMMER – "I Feel Love"

I might have given this a 10, I think. The beats are as irrestible as any dance music ever, and I love the way Donna’s vocals seem to fade in and out over it, an ethereal feel enhanced by the soft syllables. It’s one of those rare records that I feel, probably wrongly, could be ten times longer without losing its grip on me.

For a time in 1977 it was fashionable, and even desirable, to speak of and revel in the “dehumanisation” of pop. One disco hit from that year, “Welcome To Our World Of Merry Music” by Mass Production, summed up the mood by name and title alone. But there was also Bowie, writhing on the edge of total extinction on side one of Low, and then absenting himself, other than as a ghost, throughout side two; the neutered, encased howls of Iggy on “Nightclubbing,” also produced by Bowie; the first wave of instrumental synth hits such as Space’s “Magic Fly” and Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene Part IV,” both of which seemed free from the touch of any human being (which did not in itself make them bad records; quite the reverse). And of crucial course there was Kraftwerk and there was Trans-Europe Express, but I will leave it to Lena to comment further in this regard.

And then there was Giorgio Moroder, and his preferred singer Donna Summer. And there was the then-new cult of the extended 12-inch single, to prolong dancers’ drug-induced ecstasy on dancefloors; “Love To Love You Baby,” a semi-banned top five hit in early ’76, sold mainly on the glorious 16 minutes and 47 seconds of its full-length 12-inch incarnation. Summer and Moroder’s subsequent work provides a curious parallel to that of Scott Walker; the expatriate, slightly lost American reworking American musical memes in densely European ways (the echt-Spector of “Love’s Unkind” has the clarity and slight coldness of a European studio). Even Moroder’s minimalism was dense; listening to their masterpiece, 1977’s double album fairytale Once Upon A Time…Happily Ever After, there are always at least three different basses on the go. That record denies the lie of “inhumanity”; listening to the still-astounding eleven-minute segue of “Now I Need You”/”Working The Midnight Shift,” you have to remind yourself that Underworld didn’t record this yesterday, and that its emotional essence is about a shattered and abandoned human being long since condemned to existence rather than life.

“I Feel Love” comes at the end of the album I Remember Yesterday, an electro-xerox of the history of 20th century pop, and its sudden surge into the future is as shocking as that of “A Day In The Life” or “Good Vibrations” at the end of their respective albums. The song, even on seven-inch, lasted for five minutes and 55 seconds – the same length as “Bohemian Rhapsody” – and I bought it in Listen Records on the same Saturday afternoon that “Pretty Vacant” came into the shop (in the following Tuesday’s chart, the latter entered at #45 on two hours’ sales alone; the next week it vaulted up to #7). I loved them both, of course, but despite the already reliable tornado that was “Pretty Vacant” (the headlines in the papers at the time were “This Time The Pistols Keep It Clean” – didn’t they listen to the way Lydon pronounced “va-cunt” over and over?), after one listen to “I Feel Love” I knew this was the real future.

The record itself stands at the crossroads of just about everything. The lyrics are pared back and minimal to a degree not witnessed since “Tutti Frutti” – fascination over meaning again – but then the meaning was so unambiguous and precise. Summer sings “Ooohhh, it’s so good, it’s so good…” and “Ooooohhhh, heaven knows, heaven knows…” with curlicues straight out of Patti Page, or maybe Laura Nyro. The impression is of signifiers of love derived from second-hand knowledge of The History Of Pop, cut up, minimised and encased within an unending and palpable pulse.

Then we reach the gliding sustenatos of the chorus, which now betrays psychedelia, but instead of guitars-as-sitars there is this unplaceable electronic harmony, not quite mechanical and not quite lubricious. And then, after the second verse and chorus, Moroder has the unprecedented audacity to fade Summer’s voice out altogether, leaving just the metronomic beat and the basic eight-note rotogravure pulse. This was something no one could recall having happened on a pop record before, and…

…it just continues. Synthesisers and additional rhythms in different keys and at different angles and tempi fly in and out of the track like transient constellations. It is hypnotic and enticing and entirely alien, and demands a rare degree of micro-listening; to catch all the different little imprints and tones before they vanish, knowing that each changes the basic DNA of the track imperceptibly but irreversibly. In truth the recording was far less complicated; the bass pulse was a four-note riff played in the left channel which immediately echoes half a beat later in the right. But its implications changed the way pop music sounded forever.

And there is something of the triumphant as the framework, the mesh, lets Summer back in: “Ooooohhhh, I got you, I got you…I go-ooooo-t youuuuuu…” Some think she is trapped in the Moroder machine, but it is much more apparent that this is Summer singing from the inside of herself; the pulses are the arteries, carrying the blood to the hippest of hips, a speed and rush which no drug or machine could provide; she is singing of life, in life, of herself and gladly and ecstatically in herself. It is self-pleasure, and I can understand the remarks of Ken Burns (a different one) in his sleevenote to Rhino’s The Disco Years: Volume 5 compilation where he wonders whether Summer was so securely trapped within that Munich machine that she would have extreme difficulty feeling anything, even if I completely disagree with them.

“From here to eternity, that’s where she takes me,” sang Moroder on his own, equally avant-garde hit single a few months later; and “I Feel Love” takes us into a gorgeously golden future as unapologetically as “God Save The Queen” – the sequencers, the style being the content, the irrefutable and marvellous pulse plugged into our thankfully still beating hearts and minds; it could go on forever (and Patrick Cowley’s subsequent fifteen-minute remix seemed intent on testing out that theory) and thereby ensures that pop, and life, and love, and not in that order, can go on forever. And ever. “I Feel Love” is the beginning of this writer’s time. Ten to the power of forever.

And via that, I think a path can even be traced between “I Feel Love” and MBV!

I had a little bet with myself that this would one of Tom’s 10s but I lost. Certainly I can see it as Tom’s epiphany.

For myself, yes, this is a high scorer, but yes, a 9 not a 10. I think I probably depart from Tom here in that, as electronica goes, and I’m not a fan I’m afraid, this is up there with my absolute favourites. The reason for this, I think, lies in its very primitiveness, perhaps. That throbbing, almost but never actually monotonous, beat is a perfect complement for the most primitive music of all, Donna Summer’s dreamy, sexy voice. The electronica is always there, but it’s always Donna to the fore. And I love the way the phasing comes in and out, and the the rhythm breaks up into a subtle syncopation – that’s what keeps it from tedium, I feel.

It was only last night that the complacent world of ‘rock’ got another reminder that there are other kinds of music that are popular, that can move the crowd…

And I can well imagine some people, in 1977, being annoyed with this, this woman’s voice floating above and inside the constantly changing and pulsating beats, her voice repeating the same words, until the words themselves (almost, not quite) are expanded to include the music, the words are music…for those whose definition of ‘rock’ was accepting the guitar/bass/drums/singer mode only (meaning the Pistols were fine, by the way, if rude), this song getting to #1 must have been an affront – especially when the singer simply disappeared, and the music hypnotically took over…

…and elsewhere in Germany, what can I say?…

The beat skips and bounces, skips and bounces. Six notes repeat over and over, going up, up, up, up, up, UP. Then the melody, stately, perhaps a bit cold, but there and unmistakable. Doppler notes come….and go….a man sings about Paris, Vienna, Dusseldorf. The song pushes along in an orderly fashion, with odd pauses and breaks, but always with a sense of purpose and nobility. There is that beep-beep-be-be-beep which is oddly funky as well, though I don’t know who, outside of a few, heard it as such in ’77…

…but I am sure Moroder did, and that he and Kraftwerk were thinking along the same lines (Kraftwerk have an album called Man-Machine, but “I Feel Love” is a cheerier version of what could be called Woman-Machine). The biggest difference between the two artists is that while Kraftwerk were underground – you had to know about them to know about them – Donna Summer was #1. Donna felt love until that feeling was simplified and amplified to a beating heart sped up; Kraftwerk took the Trans-Europe Express and turned what was merely mechanical and gave it soul. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of either of these as they are just as radical as ever…

…and I only mentioned Jay-Z in the beginning as I am sure that he caught up with them (and much else) in his own time, and understands them in a way that, say, Noel Gallagher doesn’t.

(I should also add “I Feel Love” gets an 11, and that its pulsing beat will return, slowed down some, will return quite soon.)

Sigh.

I don’t get it. I really don’t. There has never been a moment where this song has not struck me as monotonous and boring. (And you know what, while I’m marking myself as a fierce iconoclast/rockist tool, the charms of Abba (save “Dancing Queen” and “Waterloo”) are completely lost on me.) The best I can get is a kind of forced admiration. I wish I could explain it better, but I’m never going to be able to make any kind of personal connection with this.

In hindsight, this is the great musical shift of 1977, not punk. Punk was conservative in its radicalism, in the way it was, in part, about restoring rock to its radical roots, even as it reconnected popular music with the early-twentieth-century modernist cabaret and its desire to épater les bourgeois and so on. But it restored and reminded and recreated; for punk there was no future politically and, in a sense, artistically; it was the second wave that tried to shape the future in artistic terms.

What always strikes me about this single is its single minded determination to be what it is. It strips the lush strings of disco away, and somehow makes those earlier records seem to lightweight, too concerned to be liked. The jackhammering electronic rhythm, with its squealing washes of jubilant pain, seems entirely defiant about the new sound it’s making. And of course, with the same oxymoron than would fire up UK Garage twenty years later, the vocal is all feeling, intense feeling, even if amorally articulated and centred on one emotion of desire. And that all creates a sense of year zero – a false sense, as has already been noted – but the uncompromising becoming-to-itself of electronic dance music in this single is unmistakeable.

The coincidence that also powers the epochal character of this record is that Elvis died when it was at number 1. The king is dead, long live the queen.

Re: 15. God, it’s never struck me before – If Elvis had clung on for another couple of years, he’d have gone disco at some stage!

…which we won’t be discussing today 😉

(re comment #2: Much as I love Popular, one advantage for me of the low frequency of late is that my comics posts get higher in the ‘most read’ charts – one was even at #1 for a short while! Popular entries get several times the readership – and quite right too.)

Did you mean to write unPopular?

Thinking about it, ‘Put Your Love In Me’ also sounds a bit like dub to me, as well, in the echoing and spaced-out (in both senses) percussive knocks. It’s certainly a song that encourages myriad impressions and interpretations on the part of the listener.

My not loving it as much as “Hot Love”, “Dancing Queen” or “Eleanor Rigby” I guess!

If I factored “importance” in it would totally be a 10. But I try not to, except inasmuch as it uplifts or drags down a specific record for me.

I actually played this at the last Poptimism, and the crowd (those who were left at the end anyway) went wild!

I did shift it up to +4 or so though.

Re: 15 & 17. I think Wichita Lineman may have told me this, but apparently Kelly Marie’s Feels Like I’m In Love was originally written for Elvis.

A STONE COLD 10 IF ANY OF THESE SONGS ARE! RESIGN!

# 33 – No, DON’T resign, Tom. You will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered. Your mark is your own.

Meh! Stand your ground, Tom. I agree that IFL, while undoubtedly a great track, is not that easy to love.

If Tom were going to resign for failing to grant a 10, he should have done after House of the Rising Sun (a track at least as important in pop history as this one), Good Vibrations or Grapevine!

I agree with Mark that every track should get a 10. Absolutist impulse > 16th century Silesian choral meticulousness.

As for Angelo, the review on that one surely makes it clear that it’s a deeply shoddy record which I happen to enjoy a bit, rather than (as a lot of 4s and 5s are) a well-crafted one which happens to bore me. Don’t focus on the mark, in other words!

The reason no one does it at karaoke is because they get stuck for something to do during the long instrumental break in the middle.

I sense much hostility to the punk rock in this thread, by jingo. No change there, then.

This isn’t the future of music, it was barely the future of pop. It’s a nice wee song and a good singer, I’d give it 6 or 7, but it’s certainly not as earthshaking as is being made out. It’s still basically just a disco record at heart, after all.

I remember my brother raving about this and about pop music made without instruments in general, which didn’t impress me much, as it seemed to be a technical achievement rather than a musical one.

Also, “just a disco record” is heresy around these parts.

the technical achievements vs musical achievements thing will probably occur more and more as head on thru the 80s. i suspect it will only be invoked by people with some musical background tho, people who can and have played. any expert insight from a musicians pov here would be most welcome by me tho (even if it does mean putting up with occasional derision or indifference to the evolution of Dance Music and it’s definitive hallmarks).