Before Britney. Before Gaga. Before Taylor. There Was Donna.
Beauty. Boldness. Disco. And THAT voice.
Before Britney.
Before Gaga.
Before Taylor.
Before the enormous stadium tours, carefully constructed eras, instantly recognizable looks, controversies, videos, choreography, and the idea that a female pop star could become something much larger than the songs she sang...
There was Donna.
Donna Summer.
The Queen of Disco.
Although even that title, as magnificent as it is, somehow feels too small for what she actually was.
I grew up in an interesting place generationally.
I was one of seven children, which meant our house stretched across generations. My older siblings were Boomers. The younger ones were Gen X.
So while I was growing up and slowly discovering my own musical identity, I was also living underneath the wave of my older brothers' and sisters' experiences.
And when they reached the 1970s?
Disco happened.
Not just disco music.
Disco.
The whole thing.
And looking back, I realize I had a front-row seat to a culture I wasn't quite old enough to participate in yet.
Going to the Disco Was a Campaign
My older siblings didn't experience music quite the way I eventually would.
When I got older and rock and roll got hold of me, I listened.
I studied albums. I learned songs. I hunted for obscure recordings. I read liner notes. I wanted to know who the musicians were and what else they had done.
My older siblings?
They were going to the disco.
And going to the disco was almost tribal.
You didn't simply decide at 8:30 that you might pop over to the club.
There were preparations.
People practiced dances so they could show them off on the floor.
They went shopping for clothes.
Hair had to be right.
The group had to be assembled.
The whole thing had an energy and a ritual around it.
Then Saturday Night Fever came along and disco seemed to explode into everything.
The Bee Gees were everywhere.
Disco was everywhere.
And all of that music floated through our house because my older brothers and sisters were living in the middle of it.
I was listening from the edges.
And somewhere in all that sound, one voice started separating itself from everything else.
Donna Summer.
Excuse Me, What Is This Woman Doing?
One of my earliest strong memories of Donna came courtesy of my sister.
She had “Love to Love You Baby.”
Not just the little radio version.
Oh, no.
We had the extended version.
And extended meant EXTENDED.
The famous long version runs nearly seventeen minutes and takes up an entire side of the album. Donna created it with producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, and the recording became one of the songs that helped establish both Summer and Moroder as major forces in the emerging disco sound. “Love to Love You Baby” reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1976.
And if you've never heard it...
Well.
How shall I put this?
Donna spends a significant portion of the record sounding like she is having a very, very good day.
😂
I was young.
I did not entirely understand what I was listening to.
I understood enough to know that something unusual was happening.
Apparently radio programmers agreed because the sensuality surrounding the song created controversy.
But controversy didn't stop Donna Summer.
If anything, it announced her.
This woman wasn't arriving quietly.
Then Came Bad Girls
And THIS is the Donna Summer era burned into my memory.
Bad Girls landed in 1979 as a double album, and it was enormous. It spent six weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and produced the No. 1 singles “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls,” along with the No. 2 “Dim All the Lights.” “Hot Stuff” also earned Summer the Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.
I bought the album.
Of course I did.
And remember what albums were then.
This wasn't a little square image on a screen.
It was an object.
A double album meant artwork.
Photography.
Liner notes.
Two records.
You opened it. You studied it. You lived with the imagery while you listened to the music.
And Donna Summer's imagery was...
whew.
Beautiful.
Sensual.
Naughty.
Glamorous.
Confident.
Donna wasn't hiding.
She understood presentation before I even had language for what an artist's “brand” was.
Then there was the title song.
“Bad Girls.”
As a kid, I'm hearing:
Toot toot. Hey. Beep beep.
Catchy!
Fun!
And then my mother had to explain to me what the song was actually about.
😂
Oh.
Those bad girls.
The song was about women working the streets.
In fact, Summer said the idea grew from an incident in which one of her assistants was mistaken for a sex worker by a police officer. She held onto the song even when Casablanca's Neil Bogart reportedly wanted her to give it to Cher. Eventually Donna recorded it herself.
Good call, Donna.
Very good call.
Because “Bad Girls” spent five weeks at No. 1.
She Wasn't Just Singing the Songs
This is what I understand differently now.
Donna Summer was helping construct an experience around Donna Summer.
That's why I think about her when I look at the enormous female pop stars who came later.
I am not suggesting Donna invented female superstardom. There were extraordinary women before her, and there would be extraordinary women after her.
But Donna was one of the women who showed my generation what it could look like when the singer herself became the event.
The sound.
The hair.
The clothes.
The album covers.
The sensuality.
The controversy.
The performance.
The attitude.
And most importantly...
the voice.
Before I understood what a pop icon was, Donna Summer showed me what one looked like.
And She Took Chances
This is another part of Donna's legacy that deserves more attention.
It would have been very easy to keep reproducing whatever version of Donna Summer was currently selling.
Instead, her music kept stretching.
Take “I Feel Love.”
Donna and Giorgio Moroder created something that sounded startlingly different from much of the disco surrounding it. Moroder's synthesizer-driven production helped point toward electronic dance music that would come long after disco itself had supposedly died. Moroder has spoken about continuing to hear echoes of that sound in later music.
Then listen to “Hot Stuff.”
That's disco?
Sure.
But listen to that guitar.
There's rock in there.
There's R&B.
There's pop.
There's Donna.
And then look beyond the height of disco.
“On the Radio.”
“Enough Is Enough.”
“She Works Hard for the Money.”
“This Time I Know It's for Real.”
She kept moving.
Her career didn't begin and end underneath a disco ball. The Songwriters Hall of Fame notes that when she moved to Geffen Records in 1980, she continued into new musical territory and worked with producers including Quincy Jones and Michael Omartian.
That's important.
Because eventually America decided disco wasn't cool anymore.
Donna Summer apparently neglected to disappear.
You Couldn't Kill the Music
Years later, something funny happened.
A movie called The Full Monty came along.
It was 1997.
And right there in the soundtrack was Donna Summer's “Hot Stuff.”
There's this wonderfully funny scene where the men are standing in an unemployment line when the song begins playing.
And little by little...
they can't help themselves.
The choreography starts creeping in.
😂
Nearly twenty years after “Hot Stuff” first arrived, there was Donna again, booming through movie theaters.
And it worked.
That's the thing.
It still worked.
People who hadn't been there for the original disco explosion were encountering the music in an entirely different cultural moment.
That's what happens when a song manages to escape its era.
It stops being merely nostalgic.
It becomes part of the vocabulary.
And Donna's music has done that again and again.
Then I Saw Her
Many years later, I had an opportunity I never expected.
I saw Donna Summer perform at a corporate event.
By then, of course, I was an adult.
The little girl listening to her older siblings' disco records was long gone.
The music industry had changed.
I had changed.
Donna had changed.
Then she performed “Don't Cry for Me Argentina.”
And I remember essentially thinking:
Wait a damn minute.
Is this the same woman?
The woman from the disco?
The woman from Bad Girls?
The woman who spent nearly seventeen minutes making young Angel wonder what on earth was happening on “Love to Love You Baby”?
THIS WOMAN?
Because Donna Summer opened her mouth and sang musical theater...
and that voice rocked.
Interestingly, the song wasn't some random departure for her. Donna's professional career had included musical theater from the beginning. As a teenager, she moved to Germany to perform in Hair, and “Don't Cry for Me Argentina” later connected her back to those theatrical roots.
I didn't need to know any of that while I was sitting there listening.
I just heard her.
And suddenly I understood Donna Summer differently.
It Was Always the Voice
The disco was magnificent.
The glamour was magnificent.
The sensuality was part of it.
The fashion mattered.
The album covers mattered.
The controversy mattered.
Giorgio Moroder's production mattered enormously.
The cultural moment mattered.
But strip everything away.
Turn off the disco ball.
Take away the beautiful clothes.
Put Bad Girls back in its sleeve.
Forget the controversy surrounding “Love to Love You Baby.”
Forget the title Queen of Disco for a moment.
Leave one woman standing onstage with a microphone.
And let Donna Summer sing.
There it is.
That's what lasted.
Donna Summer could sing.
Not merely perform a disco song.
Sing.
She had the instrument underneath the phenomenon.
And perhaps that's what I couldn't completely understand when I was young.
I was watching the explosion.
As an adult, I could finally appreciate the artist standing at its center.
Before There Was...
Today we have generations of enormous female stars.
Britney.
Gaga.
Beyoncé.
Taylor.
Women who understand that a major pop career can encompass music, fashion, imagery, storytelling, spectacle, reinvention and an entire relationship with an audience.
Each of those women built something distinctly her own.
But when I look backward through my life, before I understood any of those ideas...
I remember Donna.
I remember the records playing while my older siblings prepared to go dancing.
I remember trying to understand “Love to Love You Baby.”
I remember that magnificent Bad Girls album.
I remember the whistles.
The hair.
The beauty.
The voice.
I remember “Hot Stuff” turning up years later in The Full Monty and discovering that the song hadn't lost an ounce of its swagger.
And I remember finally standing in a room while Donna Summer sang.
So yes.
They called her the Queen of Disco.
She earned it.
But I think she was something more.
She was a woman willing to be sensual when sensuality created controversy.
Experimental when she could have repeated herself.
Rock when people expected disco.
Theatrical when people thought they already knew what her voice could do.
And unforgettable long after the culture that originally crowned her had moved on.
Before Britney.
Before Gaga.
Before Taylor.
There was Donna.
And Her Majesty could sing.
Thanks for taking another trip back with me.
Were you there when Donna Summer ruled the radio? What song takes you back first: “Last Dance,” “Hot Stuff,” “Bad Girls,” “On the Radio,” “I Feel Love,” “She Works Hard for the Money”... or something else entirely?
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Until next time...
Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)
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