a close reading of donna summers i feel love

sufi

sufi

lala
I threatened luka a some time ago with “a close reading of donna summers i feel love” ala barty
so, as a tribute to our absent friends :cry:
​

dinner dress and banks of keyboards, a black woman doing robot moves, most early of techno clonks (timestamp - like tubular bells with abstract electronic quacks breaking in as moments of sheer exuberance, feeding back, dubbing out (or did i imagine/insert that>)) - that futuristic diggadiggadiggadigga sounds now kind of tinny/taiwan? It’s hard to step back in time to get a context
what business anyway does a song of this era even have with a video. how many shots to create this monument, miming, not even on the track
​

A humble offering in some ways - In retrospect an old fashioned performance, the theatre, live studio audience, modest visual effects but perhaps in its time an abstract and futuristic novelty, there’s a wondrous simplicity in it all, the staging, the message – direct and immediate, repetitious and in the music, it’s grandiose minimalism,


now the song the visuals the audience on their seats are a package a bauble the cameras gliding around like daleks the dress cyberarmor donna uncompromising majestic

primordial electronic artifact – the technology of plastic and metal emerging germinating into the light
​


I saw this ok article yesterday, I think Donna's situation as an American in Europe is interesting, unlocks something
in solidarity BLM ✊
 
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Leo

Leo

Well-known member
the pride of Boston. but for all your admiration, Sufi, you commit the fatal sin: Donna Summers
 
Mellsman

Mellsman

Well-known member
The story is Moroder happened on an Oompah band in the Alps. Seeing the old white folk dancing to the 4/4 oompah sound sparked an epiphany.
Thus the rigid 4/4 of I feel Love.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's funny that timestretching music produces similar sounds to those found in more experimental/ambient electronic music — perhaps because that's what the experimental/ambient producers are using themselves?

Very strange seeing something that still sound so futuristic performed on stage with a guitar bloke and drum bloke.

I wondered if 'I Feel Love' predated (and therefore somewhat spookily anticipated) ecstacy, but Wiki suggests it might not have:

"A small recreational market for MDMA developed by the late 1970s,[142] consuming perhaps 10,000 doses in 1976.[130] By the early 1980s MDMA was being used in Boston and New York City nightclubs such as Studio 54 and Paradise Garage.[143][144] Into the early 1980s, as the recreational market slowly expanded, production of MDMA was dominated by a small group of therapeutically minded Boston chemists."

In any case, it's not as if the sentiment was unusual in disco. What's interesting though is the combo of rapturous emotion with robosounds.

Our Simon wrote a piece on IFLove on Pitchfork https://pitchfork.com/features/arti...onna-summer-and-giorgio-moroders-i-feel-love/
 
sufi

sufi

lala
so @blissblogger got there first, that's a great article, cribbed mercilessly by the grauniad
i dunno if there was any additional jiggerypokery on that timestretch version but it's a substantial listen in its own right

& @Leo, Summers was always a typo! apparently it should have been Sommer - her 1st married German surname, but i stand corrected.
 
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