Donna Summer's I Feel Love

I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.

Donna Summer's I Feel Love

I'mma be real with you, I thought "Last Christmas" would be the last song-of-the-week. I'm somewhat disappointed there's yet another week, but I'm also somewhat happy to give another artist their due.

When I have no idea what to write, I go to birthdays, and three were really tempting: Paul Westerberg's (December 31th), frontman of The Replacements, Donna Summer's (December 31st), explains herself, and Jim Reid's (December 29th), frontman of Jesus and Mary Chain. I went with Donna Summer. What, no "You Trip Me Up"? No "Can't Hardly Wait"? One, I love "I Feel Love", as much as I feel unable for the task of writing about it. Two, it's a good palate cleanser after "Last Christmas". So, for this latter reason, "I Feel Love" wins because music is music, after all.

So, happy birthday Donna.

It's always a joy to write about Donna Summer. Here's an interesting question: how old do you think Donna was when "Last Dance" (1978) was released? (Please tell me you've heard "Last Dance". Please.) I'll wait.

Ready? Okay.

Donna was 29.

What about the hot-blooded "Hot Stuff"? (You better have heard "Hot Stuff".)

Donna was 30 when "Hot Stuff" was released (1979).

I think this is why Donna is so prominent to me even among many other female artists: she participated in some of the most memorable, most danceable, most blood-pounding songs ever, and yet she accomplished this at an age when female artists fade rather than burn. I also think age had to do with her longevity: the youngest artists have verve and moxie, sure, they're willing to break boundaries, right, but they lack substance. The younger they are, the more they think singing should be like this, achieving the highest of highs, the brightest of brights. This is just not true. Art has darkness. Donna's voice never went to the highest of the high, but she had a voice that could even bring the dead back to life. There's something incredibly seductive about Donna's cooing, echoing through the pockets of the song and filling up its whole world, without overwhelming it as is fitting for love.

I think the main reason why I love "I Feel Love" is because it's the most positive take on technology an artist has had yet. Kraftwerk treated it coldly; Gary Numan treated it ironically; most artists merely commodified it. We, the audience, treat it with cynicism or fetishism. Donna is not singing over machines, neither is Donna the machines themselves a la Robyn's "Fembot", Donna feels through the synths themselves, as if they have cybernetically enhanced her ability to feel and perceive. Where Donna needs to put into so much prose how she feels love in "I Remember Yesterday", she needs much fewer words to describe how she feels love in this new age, letting the instruments talk for her. This effect becomes so clear when the synths climax as she does, as if one sees the electricity coursing through her in her moment of greatest desire.

As Giorgio Moroder, the producer of the track, has said, Robby Wedel was the unsung hero of the song for his technical know-how of the Moog synthesizer, the other artist besides Donna. The Moog is a fascinating instrument, even when taking into account how it was approached culturally by its artists. For the layman, the Moog is really a lot of little machines coordinated together to make sound. But the Moog produced sound that wasn't as lifeless as its description makes it out to be. In comparison to the more popular use of synths, for example in Soft Cells' "Tainted Love", The Pet Shop Boys' "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)", and a-ha's "Take On Me", which I would call forceful, abrasive use of synths, meant to contrast sharply with the human voice, the Moog was soft, vibrant and expressive, even when disconnected from human vocals. Mort Garson in particular made an album dedicated to plants with the Moog; his love for these living green beings shows. This is a funny thing to point out because Robert Moog himself described the use of the Moog in "I Feel Love" as sterile, that Donna was "fighting the sequencer".

I'd love to know why he hears what he hears. I don't get that impression at all, but then again, I live in a completely different generation of listeners of electronic music. I understand part of what Moog hears: in comparison to Garson's lush compositions, the Moog is used in a rote way; it churns solidly, singlemindedly towards its sole goal, to play the beat. Where it is programmed to play a note, it plays a note; when it is not, it lapses into silence.

But this is a problematic way to look at it. I just described what a musician does. Steely Dan felt the same way too - so much so that they got rid of their pesky session musicians and replaced them with a machine, might I add, a Platinum-winning machine. I mean, we're not talking about jazz, where improvisation is key, we're talking about a static studio recording, where for the most part the artist expects a great deal of predictability. Sometimes, you just want a musician to bang a drum, or pick notes off of the bass, nothing more, nothing less.

But that's another problematic way to look at it. Music is not just about timing. Music at its core is how the sound interacts with air, how sound fades into silence, how silence erupts into sound, how sound echoes through the room, how sounds interact with each other. Music is about harmony, and in its own odd way it little matters what is played so long as it unites with its neighbors at the end (have ya heard "Trout Mask Replica"?). In a way, it's significant if a musician is even there, present, in the moment of music-making; sometimes the musician's mere presence is more significant than what they even play. In that sense art is alive, it's about the chance encounters that make moments, meaning, you can't just say Ringo Starr is the luckiest man alive, he's an integral component of The Beatles for the mere fact that he was there.

So the Moog is blessed to be playing next to Donna Summer, and Donna is blessed to be playing next to the Moog. Any later, and you would have had a crappy synthesizer that would be sharper and harder than it needed to be; you need a synthesizer befitting a world amazed by the future, as one feels in Stanley Kubrick's vision of the world in 1968's "2001: A Space Odyssey". The Moog needed Moroder and Wedel, Moroder for his knack of earworms going back to his first hit, "Looky Looky", basically a Beach Boys-esque pop hit, and Wedel, for his ability to operate the Moog as a professional engineer.

Moroder, in his mercenary way, understood what the Moog was for, as he understood what every instrument is for: the beat. Well, that and the hook. It doesn't matter if you have an orchestra, it doesn't matter if you're a three-man band, that's all that matters; you can be given a piece of technology able to do anything and audiences will only look for that flutter, that steady drum of the heart. Robert Moog, as an engineer, likely saw everything in the Moog; I don't know, but I would wager he had some roots in classical and some elements of experimental music. Artists, however, only get to places when they see one thing at one time, and they spend their heart and soul getting to it before moving onto the next one. To the audience, there is nothing stilted or awkward in the Moog's four-on-the-floor bass drum; they easily make in their minds the metaphor of the drum to their feet.

But let's focus on the drum for a bit (by the way, the drum kick is human, played by a Keith Forsey, the only other human on the track besides Donna Summer). Compare it to another disco track released that year, the famous "Disco Inferno" of The Trammps. The obvious difference is that the tempos of the songs are slower, but another discernible difference is the concept of air. When Earl Young hits the drums, you can feel the air audibly shake around the band, creating an echoing effect. There is none with the Moog. Don't confuse the delay of the bass as an echo; it doesn't breathe into the air and expand, as sound should when played acoustically. The Moog essentially plays in outer space. This is important. What makes songs like "Disco Inferno" so irresistible is the inevitable chaos that comes from actually playing the instruments, that comes from sound clashing, that comes from the band being there, and Jimmy Ellis and the band's call-and-response of "Burn, baby, burn!", "Disco inferno!"

For electronic music, chaos has to be added through the creative process alone, unless you're doing a weird "Disintegration Loops" thing. A great example is the intro of "I Feel Love", where the synths bubble and spill over each other, as if we're witnessing the Big Bang, before lapsing into silence and the indomitable void of the universe. Yet the creation of life never ends: the Moog resumes certain sounds, leitmotifs basically, throughout the course of the song that never feels rote or stale, as the sudden crackle of electricity, a murmur of keys, an escalating pattern.

Then there's Donna's singing. Donna was not found as the Queen of Disco; she began with musicals, starting with a New York production of "Hair", then moving to Germany to play in "Ich bin ich", "Godspell", and "Show Boat". I like to think this is where Donna found her style of "conversational" singing. With music, at least music nowadays, the singer tries to overwhelm, tries to glamorize; in musicals, the singer communicates. What is incredible about Donna's voice is not her extreme range of singing, but her restraint, her ability to sustain a note and modulate her voice, delicately, gently, and yet powerfully, from one idea to the next. This is a nocturnal type of voice, a voice that pulls the listener in not by showing off all its treasures immediately, but by showing off the promise of release. She's transcendental on the track, as word falls upon word, "I feel love, I feel love, I feel love..." like footfalls in the night, only for her to resurge, crying, "I feel love!"

There's no doubt: without Donna, there is no "I Feel Love". Take Sam Smith's version, where he's way too high and pitchy at onset. Take Messiah's, where she's too quick on delivery. Neither musician, of course, attempts to replicate Donna's original. Without the vocals, "I Feel Love" doesn't even arise to being compelling house music. With Donna, "I Feel Love" becomes a resurrection in outer space, on par with the ending of "2001", except, you know, not depressing and about death. It's a song on how love creates life.

(I do kinda love the near-industrial feel of Messiah's version, the more I listen to it.)

In my time of listening to music, I have heard no tracks that sound remotely like "I Feel Love". I have never seen an artist attempt to reproduce its affect. It is. It is lone and singular. I don't even consider it the genesis of disco or club music or anything, though it's certain many artists have chased after it. Even Donna hadn't bothered trying it again, though "I Feel Love" isn't the only peak in her career. "I Feel Love" is a blazing bright sun in a field of art that is lucky to have so many great stars. And it's amazing to contemplate that the individuals who contributed to it, Summer, Moroder, George Bellotte (also a producer), Wedel, Forsey, and the Moog, really didn't know what they were making until they made it (Donna famously did a bunch of tracks in "I Remember Yesterday" in one take). Sometimes an idea is all it takes.