Ooooo​oooo​ooo​ooo​ooo​ooo​​ooh

July 1, 2022 11:41 AM

45 years ago, some people invented the future. In the summer of 1977, Donna Summer (an American), Giorgio Moroder (an Italian) and Pete Bellotte (a Brit) were all living and working in Germany. Alongside engineer Robbie Wedel (an actual German) and a pile of Moog kit, they managed for the first time to sync up all the music tracks to a steady pulse, adding sinuous, ecstatic vocals to a robotic bassline.

I Feel Love made it to Number 1 in the UK in July 1977, number 6 in the US in November and also topped the charts in Australia, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Even more significant was a remix by San Francisco-based Patrick Cowley, who made an epic club mix starting with nothing more than a DJ pressing and his own painstakingly realised imagination.

Both the original and Cowley's remix inspired whole genres of music. In the words of Simon Reynolds, "If any one song can be pinpointed as where the 1980s began, it's 'I Feel Love'."

Previously

posted by YoungStencil (50 comments total)

i woulda bet anything this post was written by hippybear. that is a Compliment.
posted by j_curiouser at 11:44 AM on July 1, 2022 [26 favorites]

"I Feel Love" is pure musical ecstasy in every single possible sense of that word. So great, so pivotal, so all-enveloping. No superlative is sufficient.

It is one of the small handful of songs that I wish would go on forever and ever, and never ever ever ever stop. (Parliament's "Flash Light" is another.)
posted by Dr. Wu at 11:52 AM on July 1, 2022 [15 favorites]

It still sounds like the future.
posted by mykescipark at 12:26 PM on July 1, 2022 [16 favorites]

Giorgio Moroder also composed the Neverending Story soundtrack, which is pure 80s electronica joy.
posted by Atrahasis at 12:34 PM on July 1, 2022 [7 favorites]

My favorite hourlong Moroder Appreciation Mix is still Chrissy Murderbot's from his year of mixtapes, which has "I Feel Love" at about the halfway point before going off to Sparks and Limahl to really capture the 80s.
posted by Kyol at 12:44 PM on July 1, 2022 [8 favorites]

its funny to think of this song, and Star Wars, both coming out in 1977. I was only 9, so I remember both but it really must have seemed like yeah, the future is here! to adults?
posted by supermedusa at 12:55 PM on July 1, 2022 [4 favorites]

Same crew that put together "Love to Love You Baby."

I walked into a head shop in Seattle back in the day, that song was on, and the girl behind the counter was performing the hell out of it for a good minute before turning around and seeing me. She blushed so hard I was worried about her.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 12:57 PM on July 1, 2022 [10 favorites]

their boss at Casablanca Records, Neil Bogart, jumped on it. He’d also spotted ‘Love To Love You Baby’’s commercial potential in 1975, after seeing the effects it had on people at an orgy in his house, and asked for it to be made into a 17-minute mix, long before the era of the commercial twelve-inch disco single). “He was an incredible music man,” Bellotte says.

Cocaine's a hell of a drug.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:15 PM on July 1, 2022 [10 favorites]

Propeller’s blending of Donna Summer singing “I Feel Love” and Booker T and The MGs’ “Green Onions” isn’t all that crafty or gimmicky, it’s just kind of cool and eerie - an opium dream of sexy funk. And by pitch-shifting Summer’s vocal, the whole thing sounds like it’s being beamed in from another planet.
Donna Summer and Booker T the MG s I Feel Love (very rare)

The Donna Summer Special 1980 (Original Master Copy)
posted by robbyrobs at 1:16 PM on July 1, 2022 [6 favorites]

There's a good chance it has aged better than anything else from 1977.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:21 PM on July 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

I’ve loved this song since I was a teenager, when I first heard it on a pirate radio station in my hometown in the 90s (it played an endless loop of mostly-instrumentals from the 50s through the 70s - also the first place I heard Sleep Walk, Tighten Up, Green Onions). I would turn this up and croon along - “happy love, happy love, happy love” (never been good with lyrics!). Listening now with headphones? YOWSA

I hear so many other musicians I love: Phillip Glass, Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem. LCD Soundsystem in particular led me down a rabbit hole a number of years back, rooting around in ESG and italo disco and an amazing now-lost internet German duo who made internet mixes of disco under the name Ebony Cuts. Kyol, I’m grooving SO hard to this mix you shared. YoungStencil, thank you!
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 1:36 PM on July 1, 2022 [5 favorites]

If you enjoy "I Feel Love" and Moroder's classic electrodisco production, don't sleep on the spiritual successor to "I Feel Love", the Sparks/Moroder collaboration album No. 1 in Heaven.
posted by SansPoint at 1:43 PM on July 1, 2022 [6 favorites]

Man, that first video- shows how far ahead this song was as they clearly have no idea how to square this with American Bandstand style tv staging. The backing band and orchestra (!) who are presumably there for the other songs are left sitting there awkwardly (or in one case, doing weird air drumming), while the electronic backing band is all played live - imagine being one of 2 or 3 keyboardists that have to play the same 4 bar riff on repeat with perfect timing for the entire song.

Donna’s understated half-robot dancing is sublime. You could do this whole performance in 2022 and it wouldn’t feel like a throwback.
posted by q*ben at 1:44 PM on July 1, 2022 [3 favorites]

also from Giorgio Moroder in 1977 and as coolly eternal as ever ...

From Here To Eternity
posted by philip-random at 1:46 PM on July 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

Kyol, the music just shifted and Donna is singing “it’s so good it’s so good” and I am shrieking out loud with joy
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 1:53 PM on July 1, 2022 [4 favorites]

I love this song, yet it makes me anxious. Anyone else?
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:56 PM on July 1, 2022 [4 favorites]

Moroder is “Italian” in nationality but he’s one of a group of people in Italy’s South Tyrol region (in the far north, below Austria’s Tirol). That area up there has unique Germanic and Italian-like languages and dialects. Kind of like Switzerland s. He grew up speaking German, Italian, Ladino and more. His mom called him “Hansjörg”. Haha
posted by engelgrafik at 2:08 PM on July 1, 2022 [7 favorites]

We saw Giorgio Moroder on a tour a few years ago, playing club dates. The man is 78/19 years old, up on the stage, behind turntables and laptops and keyboards, cranking out an absolutely spectacular set. All his hits, a bunch of mixes of songs he liked, new tracks, an extended bass-heavy Neverending Story - he was having so much fun, and it was a really joyous night for everyone there.
posted by phong3d at 2:33 PM on July 1, 2022 [9 favorites]

Moroder is probably up there with Jim Steinman in terms of taking his sound to a bunch of artists accomplished in their own right and making something incredible together. I mean, in addition to the above:

- Chase theme from Midnight Express, for which he got a Best Score Oscar

- "Flashdance - What a Feeling" with Irene Cara, who he did a whole album with; this got them the Academy Award for Best Song

- Various from the movie Cat People, including "Irena's Theme", "Paul's Theme", and the one that people are probably most familiar with (because of Inglourious Basterds), "Cat People - Putting Out Fire", with Bowie

- "Never Ending Story", from the movie, with Limahl of Kajagoogoo

- "Take My Breath Away" from the Top Gun soundtrack, with Berlin; Moroder's third Oscar
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:02 PM on July 1, 2022 [11 favorites]

Also see daft punk's Random Access Memories for direct tributes to save collaboration with Moroder
posted by lalochezia at 3:16 PM on July 1, 2022 [6 favorites]

The corpse in the library: "I love this song, yet it makes me anxious. Anyone else?"

Previously: frisson.
posted by signal at 4:02 PM on July 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

Some would say that with a song this basically perfect, no cover could do it justice. You might very well think that; I of course couldn’t possibly comment.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:05 PM on July 1, 2022 [15 favorites]

Oh, frisson is pleasant. This feeling is not.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:15 PM on July 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

The lede of the story:

Forty-five years ago, Pete briefly thought about inventing the future.

This is what happened to Pete’s future. Pete is 78.

Pleasingly for an FPP about recorded music, 33 and 45 is 78.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:27 PM on July 1, 2022 [6 favorites]

I love this song, yet it makes me anxious.

Cocaine’s a hell of a drug.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 5:53 PM on July 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

aged better than anything else from 1977

Hey now, I resemble that remark!
posted by tigrrrlily at 6:16 PM on July 1, 2022 [9 favorites]

Actual video for Summer's appearance on The Midnight Special

I recently learned the 3 backup singers are her sisters!

also I think I see Lee Sklar there in the background, could be wrong . . .

Last Dance from the same 1978 show
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:47 PM on July 1, 2022 [3 favorites]

The homophobic and racist anti-disco campaign of the very late seventies meant that you did not hear this track on the radio for decades ... you had to go to the right clubs, I guess, and I didn't know about them (autistic). But that campaign made the work of the supremely talented Summer, in particular, into a bit of a guilty pleasure.

It is so great to see that the hater-ade could not kill this dopest of all dope tracks. So glad it's inspiring new generations.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 11:43 PM on July 1, 2022 [6 favorites]

Fantastic song, Sam Smith did a great cover of it too in the last few years.
posted by ellieBOA at 12:36 AM on July 2, 2022

Thanks for posting that BMG link ricochet biscuit; I saw that live and it was amazing!!
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 4:01 AM on July 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you want to hear Donna Summer in a "before they were stars" moment when she was still under her birth name Donna Gaines, here she is as a teenager singing lead on "Aquarius" in a German language production of Hair.
posted by jonp72 at 9:08 AM on July 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

When people like David Bowie and Brian Eno are wowed by what you've done, you know you're on to something. From Rolling Stone after Donna Summer's passing, ten years ago:

David Bowie famously recalled hearing it with Brian Eno, while they were working together in the late 1970s. “One day in Berlin, Eno came running in and said, ‘I have heard the sound of the future.’ And I said, ‘Come on, we’re supposed to be doing it right now.’ He said, ‘No, listen to this,’ and he puts on ‘I Feel Love,’ by Donna Summer. Eno had gone bonkers over it, absolutely bonkers. He said, ‘This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.’ Which was more or less right.”

And thank you Sheydem-tants for your callout reminding us of the homophobic and racist nature of the 'disco sucks' movement; just Google 'disco demolition racism' and get any number of articles on the naked hatred of the night they blew up a pile of (not just disco) records and rioted at a Chicago baseball stadium. Plenty of sexism as well, given the number of prominent women disco artists like Summer and the pervasive and continuing misogyny of the music industry. And yeah, I was an idiot highschooler who was unaware wilfully ignorant of the toxic underpinnings of the movement, just watched it from afar and thought it was a big laugh.

Speaking of big laughs, Donna certainly had the last one on the haters when she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.
posted by hangashore at 9:10 AM on July 2, 2022 [5 favorites]

I would like to have a better understanding of this technological breakthrough. I lived through it, was and is a huge electronic music fan, but I don't grok this sequencing. They were able finally to "sync up all the music tracks to a steady pulse" -‌- o-kay, but does that imply Wendy Carlos did not or could not, several years earlier? "Switched-On Bach" sounds pretty synchronized to me, as does Larry Fast's Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra from 1975. He even named his follow-up album "Sequencer." But what does that mean?
posted by Rash at 9:10 AM on July 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

this song, and Star Wars, both coming out in 1977. I was only 9, so I remember both but it really must have seemed like yeah, the future is here! to adults?

Well, a certain quartet of electronic musicians from Germany was not amused, after experiencing "Star Wars." Can't find the quote now but they were disgusted with its Wagnerian, symphonic soundtrack, thought its sound was the 19th century, not the future.
posted by Rash at 9:23 AM on July 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

>>I would like to have a better understanding of this technological breakthrough. I lived through it, was and is a huge electronic music fan, but I don't grok this sequencing.

This Pitchfork article gets a bit more in depth on the technical aspects of the reference pulse that was used (about a quarter down the page). Hope that helps.
posted by jeremias at 10:31 AM on July 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

o-kay, but does that imply Wendy Carlos did not or could not, several years earlier?

For Switched On Bach, Carlos was playing by hand separate tracks to a multi-track tape recorder (maybe using the sequencer only for short phrases) on an earlier but similar model Moog synthesizer. It definitely sounds sequenced, but only because it was played and edited very precisely and methodically over 8 months of long painstaking sessions.

What Robbie Wedel figured out for Moroder was a stroke of pure genius. The sync pulse was designed to talk to the sequencer and regulate it's speed. The sync pulse wasn't meant to be recorded to tape, but by doing so he could make this fancy layered sound possible by repeating a pattern over several separate tracks of tape. It's really quite clever.

By late 1970s and early 1980s there's several English synth-pop bands just stacking piles of (by now more affordable) synths together using sync/control voltage pulses. It was still a delicate process with frequent breakdowns, so early synth bands often just ran a tape deck in the back and mimed their bleeps. Until Midi eventually came along and made things easier.
posted by ovvl at 10:43 AM on July 2, 2022 [6 favorites]

Thanks for this. I grew up in rural Michigan (the heart of "Disco sucks" territory), so I certainly didn't hear this in 1977. I did hear it eventually, but I think it was under circumstances where I couldn't understand the lyrics or realize the sheer coolness of the music (undoubtedly I lacked the musical sophistication to hear "the future" in it). I also didn't see it, and seeing it now is a revelation.

As an extra bonus, after reading this thread the first time I had to go to work, and on my way passed a swimming pool full of kids with this blasting from the speakers. It was delightful. Welcome to the future, kids!
posted by acrasis at 1:18 PM on July 2, 2022

Carson: "Did you have any idea 5 , 6 years ago you'd have all this attention, notoriety, fame..."

https://youtu.be/6muiJVxMzwU?t=114
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 1:24 PM on July 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Moroder discussion brings to mind a bar-gument we once had re:
Is that moment from The Chase the first known EDM 'crowd goes Woo' Beat Drop?
posted by bartleby at 4:21 PM on July 2, 2022

Pleasingly for an FPP about recorded music, 33 and 45 is 78.

78 RPM is also the speed of the previous generation of phonograph records (pre-vinyl and early vinyl).
posted by atoxyl at 6:04 PM on July 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

From the Pitchfork article:

a Moroder solo album quietly released in 1975 to almost zero attention, Einzelgänger teems with pitter-pattering drum machine beats and unsettling processed vocal-stutters that recall the ethereal whimsy of early Kraftwerk.

(link to full album added) Hey, I had that LP!
posted by Rash at 6:53 PM on July 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

Nothing sounded like that before and it will always sound like the future to me.
posted by rmd1023 at 9:26 PM on July 2, 2022

a Moroder solo album quietly released in 1975 to almost zero attention,

and then there's 1972's Son of My Father (album and song) which is where I first heard of the artist then known as simply Giorgio.
posted by philip-random at 12:23 AM on July 3, 2022

I met Donna Summer when I was nineteen years old (1995) when i was working as tea girl at a furniture market. I’d been a fan since childhood and even though i was at peak furious punk rock, It was a dream to meet her. And she was very gracious at my babbling.
posted by thivaia at 11:40 AM on July 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

I remember reading in Simon Reynolds' book on postpunk music, Rip It Up and Start Again, that "I Feel Love" was an inspiration for "Fodderstompf" by Public Image Limited. The very early Human League track, "Dance Like A Star," also envisioned itself as a lo-fi, avant-garde version of "I Need Love."
posted by jonp72 at 12:24 PM on July 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

I first heard of the artist then known as simply Giorgio.

The Giorgio album has a track called Tears, which DJ Shadow sampled to great effect on Organ Donor.
posted by jonp72 at 2:23 PM on July 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

The homophobic and racist anti-disco campaign of the very late seventies meant that you did not hear this track on the radio for decades

That shit was for real and stunted my musical development. I was born in 1964, so as a teenager in 1978 the Village People were my favorite band for a while.* The Village People were big and mainstream. They performed at our local mall, and seeing them was my highlight of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade that year. (Which also featured an ever-rising death count from Jonestown every time we saw the headlines. The '70s were a land of contrasts.)

Then "Disco Sucks" hit in 1979, featuring Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park. Since disco was officially uncool I retreating to the cozy confines of Casey Kasem's American Top 40, and I resent it.

As a straight white dude, I recognize and appreciate the sociological importance of disco to people of color and LGBTQ people, but it's also incredibly fun music, and I missed out.

* I had no idea the Village People were gay or that their costumes were classic gay stereotypes. I now live outside San Francisco and am well-versed in that stuff.
posted by kirkaracha at 5:29 PM on July 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Some would say that with a song this basically perfect, no cover could do it justice. You might very well think that; I of course couldn’t possibly comment.

This cover is excellent. Annette Strean crush renewed.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:17 PM on July 3, 2022

So good.

And because I can’t help myself:
Lords of Synth
posted by skyscraper at 9:54 PM on July 3, 2022

In Australia they had variants of the anti-disco sentiment, including the homophobia and disdain for Black culture. Synthesiser music was briefly cool for a fortnight in 1982 or so before the backlash began, and from then onwards until the rave era it was an accepted wisdom that Synths Are For Poofs and Real Men Play Guitars. Chunking out some riffs on an electric guitar, you see, is honest, sweaty real man's work, like driving a huge mining lorry or digging a hole or any of the occupations you'd see in the old Victoria Bitter beer ads, whereas pressing buttons on an electronic keyboard is effete and unworthy. Similarly, Australia never got into Black American music like soul as much as the UK did, with it all being a bit too close to disco and insufficiently manly. It took Jimmy Barnes, a working-class Glaswegian immigrant who did the hard yards in a pub-rock band, to do a record of soul covers (all strained out sweatily like a bogan Michael Bolton, mind you) to sort of get it accepted; anything remotely smooth or funky, however, was suspect.

One place where disco and such flourished was among Australians of Greek/Italian heritage (known locally as “w_gs”, an epithet which they subsequently reclaimed). Nobody would accuse a hairy-chested Greek dude from Oakleigh (pronounced “Oookli maate!”) driving along in a V8 car with oversized fluffy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror and blasting some Donna Summer out of the equally oversized car stereo, of being effete or unmanly. Well, not to his face; behind his back, they probably would. Though there the smoothness was still seen as morally suspect and lacking the primal, visceral honesty of meat'n'potatoes Aussie Rock.
posted by acb at 6:51 AM on July 7, 2022 [1 favorite]