Rolling Stone VS. Donna Summer: A Critical Reappraisal

[markydefad]

Since HRH (as Jeff refers to her) Donna made her debut on this week's Disco Compilation Consensus chart for 10/4/75 and since I recently purchased the new Rolling Stone Album Guide and read HRH's new critical reavaluation, I thought I'd share with y'all.

I have 3 volumes of Rolling Stone Album (the first was "Record") Guides from 1979, 1992 and the new one from 2004.

I'm gonna type the RS critical evaluations of Miss Summer from those three volumes and then show her discography ratings as they have changed over the years.

Needless to say, Donna's critical stock has risen considerably since the first collection was published in 1979.

1979:

"Produced by Pete Bellotte in Munich, Donna Summer's first album consists of the full sixteen-minute discoid moans and sighs of her hit title song and a few limp soul numbers. Interestingly, only "Love To Love You Baby" is actually disco, serving as a novelty dance number. But its too slow for dancing and too long for the recorded multiple orgasms not to become self-parodying.

A Love Trilogy formularizes Summer's silky pliancy into a "mood" album, but its feeble pumping is rather boring beside Four Seasons Of Love, which is more spirited because Bellotte and his Munich Machine have finally worked out their oily European variant of the disco genre.

I Remember Yesterday proves a complete surprise. Here, Summer presents herself as a pleasantly competent soul singer; the randy Siamese posing of her earlier records disappears before her affectionate replays of Ronettes, Supremes and ballad styles, concluding with a Kraftwerk-derived dance tune, "I Feel Love." Once Upon a Time presents her as Cinderella, a ridulously gauzy move that almost works. The live album, despite containing a major hit in "MacArthur Park" (no less), is dismal. (BT= ??)

1992:

"Love To Love You Baby" sounds like a pure novelty record at first: a sultry, disembodied woman's voice shudders and sighs in the throes of passion, while a fluid dance groove provides water-bed support. With its seamless orchestration and brazen sensuality, however, this 1975 Top Ten hit heralded the dawn of disco. And from such humble beginnings sprang Donna Summer, who went on to rule this oft-maligned musical province. A Boston-born singer, who'd performed in European productions of Hair and Godspell, Summer met up with producer Giorgio Morodor in Germany. Moroder and songwriting partner Pete Bellotte crafted a sleek, propulsive orchestrated backdrop-- Eurodisco-- for Summer's heart-piercing (and occasionally ear-piercing) vocal workouts. The full-lengthy album version of "Love to Love You Baby," more than fifteen minutes of it, is a hugely influential piece of work. Moroder incorporates the mix-moves of a club DJ into a record; over a stalwart bass line, Summer's moans float endlessly around symphonic variations and a startling , Kraftwerk-style electronic intrusion.

A series of failed quasi-autobiographical concept albums followed--Eurodisco is big on CONCEPTS-- :P
A Love Trilogy, Four Seasons of Love & I Remember Yesterday. That last album spawned a masterfully synthesized Top Ten hit, "I Feel Love," in 1977. Once Upon a Time is a slightly more successful opus, while Summer's studio-bound sound falls predictably flat on Live and More. And then Donna Summer came into her own. On Bad Girls, the addition of soaring lead guitar lines and tighter, earthier songwriting took everybody--especially dance fans--by surprise. "Bad Girls" and "Hot Stuff" took this disco-rock fusion to the top of the pop charts, while slow-dancers like "Dim All the Lights" tapped into Summer's sweet side. Her On the Radio--Greatest Hits Volume I & II belongs on your shelf, right next to Chic's greatest hits. Even if you don't dance: disco doesn't get any more listenable than this.

The Wanderer continues, and deepens, the rock influence while hueing to a still-danceable Eurobeat. Quincy Jones produced the mega-ambitious Donna Summer for the new Geffen label; to put it mildly, not everything works. There is a lot to choose from: a Bruce Springsteen cover ("Protection"), a bona-fide hit single ("Love Is In Control [Finger on the Trigger]"), a new-age choral nightmare epic ("State of Independence"). She Works Hard For The Money serves up another winning, seemingly effortless vocal hook (the hit title track), amid plently of pleasantly unambitious tunes. Summer hit a rough patch after that; even Stock-Aitken-Waterman's machine -tooled dance fluff (on Another Place and Time) can't seem to get her motivated again. Mistaken Identity is not quite a full-fledged comeback, but it's quite encouraging. In between the misguided opener ("Get Ethnic") and the strained closer ("Let There Be Peace") lies striking evidence of Summer's enduring talent. Something about her voice hits home, whether she's aiming for the heart ("Work That Magic"), the soul ("Say a Little Prayer") or the feet ("Fred Astaire")." (MC =Mark Coleman)

2004:

"When Donna Summer broke her first hit, little more than whispers and moans over a tepid eurodisco beat, her career didn't seem to promise more than another Andrea True. That the best song on her second album was written by Barry Manilow wasn't very promising, either. But two things changed all that: Producer Giorgio Moroder figured out how to deploy the string synth, and Summer took charge of her material.

Turns out that she could sing, belt even. Turns out that she liked rock & roll as much as disco. Turns out that she discovered that niche at the crosshairs of rock, soul, dance, and showbizz pop that Madonna exploited so successfully a decade later.

Summer was born in Boston but went to Europe to sing onstage in productions of Hair and Godspell. There she hooked up with Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, who were cranking out disco fluff as the Munich Machine, and they had a hit with "Love to Love You Baby." Summer became an instant disco icon, and her early records exploited that. The first two albums were more Moroder/Bellotte than Summer, with side-long disco suites on the first side, and filler on the second. Indeed, one of the things that we notice now is that all of Summer's albums were conceived as LP sides, usually laid out in a continuous mix, which makes for some inconsistencies as the sides were piled up on CDs. Four Seasons of Love, a cycle of disco songs for each season, is one of the few albums that benefit from being heard whole; the transitional I Remember Yesterday, with its strong first side and filler plus hit on the second, is less consistent. But two songs there portended where Summer was going: "Love's Unkind" :D was updated girl-group rock, while "I Feel Love ," her second big hit, was so propulsive that Brian Eno called it "the future of music."

Summer's next album, Once Upon A Time, was an ambitious double-LP retelling of the Cinderella story, a suite of songs connected by a relentless disco beat. It was a lot to swallow at the time, but it contains some of her strongest work, especially Act One with "Fairy Tale High" :D and "Say Something Nice." This was an intensive period for Summer, with four double-LPs in a two-year stretch from 1977 to 1979. Bad Girls was the next new studio set, another big advance in songcraft and a broadening of her music: more rock, more soul, one side of ballads, and hits as compelling as 'Hot Stuff," "Bad Girls," and "Sunset People." The other two doubles were the improbable Live and More and the inevitable On The Radio. The much-panned live album actually sounds remarkably fresh now, the sound clear, the energy palpable. Perhaps the reason for the pans was the side-long "MacArthur Park Suite," moved from the Live and More CD to The Dance Collection, but even though it's built around one of rock's all-time worst songs, the extended music this is some of Moroder's most elegant disco, and there's nothing wrong with two interpolated Summer songs. As for On the Radio, it not only sums up Summer's oeuvre to date, half of it was new to LP, coming from singles and soundtracks.

Summer's discography falls apart after 1980: She divorced, changed labels and producers several times, remarried, proclaimed herself born-again, moved to Nashville. Not much of her post-1980 work is in print. (Hard to say why; maybe God is punishing her for blaspheming her gay fans). :P Still, the Michael Omartian-produced She Works Hard for the Money is one of the best things she's ever done.
Another Place and Time, produced by Bananarama braintrust Stock-Aitken-Waterman, is more rigid rhythmically, but she's more than ever a skilled, powerful singer. This period is chronicled, for better or worse, on the second disc of The Donna Summer Anthology. Since then, we have only the second coming of Love and More-- if tragedy returns as farce, perhaps ambition returns as conceit. Then there are the comps: the first disc of Anthology ends with "Bad Girls," a fine selection from the rising slope of her career. Endless Summer compresses Anthology's two discs down to one, including two new cuts not likely to stand the test to time.

The Millennium Collection shows only that less is less: 11 cuts, 51 minutes, a bare canonical minimum. The Journey is almost a carbon copy, with two (not bad) new songs added, but both comps thin out after the 1980s output. The Millennium Collection is more canonical, using longer mixes to stretch its not quite a dozen songs to nearly an hour. But the most effective use of her long dance mixes is on the extra disc of Bad Girls (Deluxe Edition).TH= Tom Hull)
__________________________________________________ ___

Rolling Stone Ratings Guide:

***** (5) = INDESPENSIBLE (A record that must be included in any comprehensive collection.)

**** (4) = EXCELLENT (A recod of substantial merit, though flawed in some essential way).

*** (3) = GOOD (A record of average worth, but one that might possess considerable appeal for fans of a particular style).

** (2) = Mediocre (Records that are artistically insubstantial, though not truly wretched)

* (1) = POOR (Records in which even the technical competence is at question or which are remarkably ill-conceived).

0 (0) - WORTHLESS (Records that need never (or should never ) have been created: reserved for the most bathetic bathwater).

__________________________________________________ ___

Donna's Discography (as rated by Rolling Stone)

LOVE TO LOVE YOU BABY (1975)
1979 RSRG: *
1992 RSAG: ***1/2
2004 RSAG: ***

A LOVE TRILOGY (1976)
1979: *
1992: **
2004: ***

FOUR SEASONS OF LOVE (1976)
1979: *
1992: **
2004:***1/2

I REMEMBER YESTERDAY (1977)
1979: **
1992: ***
2004: NOT LISTED

ONCE UPON A TIME(1977)
1979: **
1992: ***
2004: ***1/2

LIVE AND MORE (1978.)
1979: *
1992: **
2004: ***1/2

BAD GIRLS (1979)
1979: N/A
1992: ****
2004: ****

ON THE RADIO (1979)
1979: N/A
1992: *****
2004: ****

THE WANDERER (1980)
1992: ****
2004: NOT LISTED

DONNA SUMMER (1982)
1992: ***
2004: NOT LISTED

SHE WORKS HARD FOR THE MONEY (1983)
1992: ***1/2
2004: ****

CATS WITHOUT CLAWS (1985)
1992: **

THE SUMMER COLLECTION (1985)
1992: ***

ALL SYSTEMS GO (1987)
1992: **

THE DANCE COLLECTION (1987)
1992: ***
2004: ***1/2

ANOTHER PLACE AND TIME (1989)
1992: **1/2
2004: ***

MISTAKEN IDENTITY (1991)
1992: ***

DONNA SUMMER ANTHOLOGY (1993)
2004: ****

ENDLESS SUMMER (1995)
2004: ****

VHI PRESENTS: LIVE AND MORE ENCORE! (1999)
2004: **1/2

BEST OF DONNA SUMMER: THE MILLENNIUM COLLECTION (2003)
2004: ****

BAD GIRLS [DELUXE EDITION] (2003)
2004: *****

THE JOURNEY: THE VERY BEST OF DONNA SUMMER (2003)
2004: ****

__________________________________________________ __

What I found interesting is the critical upgrading of the early LPs from POOR to GOOD/GOOD+ and especially the "Live & More" LP (always bad-mouthed) going from POOR to GOOD+ in the 2004 edition.

I think we see what's stood the test of time.

And your faves? Hmmmm........

[neonlights]

funny how albums can go from crap to classic in the span of twenty years :P .. I'm glad to see Donna and Chic getting their due (finally).. I wonder how other disco albums/artists would fare under the same comparison.. Just goes to show that sometimes snobby critics wouldn't know a good thing if it kicked them in the ass..

Anyways my faves would be A Love Trilogy, Four Seasons Of Love, Bad Girls, The Wanderer, All Systems Go, Another Place And Time and (surprise) Mistaken Identity

I'm not so sure She Works Hard For The Money deserves the Four stars.. good song, but a mostly weak LP IMO :-?

[Salsoul1975]

You often have to wonder if the change in attitude by critics towards disco is due to the fact that today's music has deviated from melody and hooks and harmonies and whatnot; in layman's terms: the elements that constitute music. Rock critic's darlings have either died off or aged considerably though still perfomring. They no longer have the influence towards popular music as a whole as they had in the '70s heyday. This applies to both the critics and the artists.

Disco has withstood the test of time because it was a universal genre and had little to no use for pretension. The rock music that the critics masturbated with more than 30 years ago has metamorphosized into loud, screeching, blistering junk with no substance. It seems their current re-thinking of disco is just as well; realizing that the public's undying appetite for disco outlived any of their own predictions.

[markydefad]

I'm still waiting for A Love Trilogy to get its due respect. This is a wonderful LP with all the songs worth mentioning.

1 Try Me, I Know We Can Make It (Bellotte, Moroder, Summer) 17:57
2 Intro: Prelude to Love (Bellotte, Moroder, Summe) 1:06
3 Could It Be Magic (Anderson, Manilow) 5:15
4 Wasted (Bellotte, Moroder ) 5:09
5 Come With Me (Bellotte, Moroder) 4:22

"Try Me, I Know We Can Make It" was the major club record here, BUT "Could It Be Magic," Wasted" & especially "Come With Me" are all excellent. :D :D :D


Four Seasons of Love, I Remember Yesterday, & Once Upon a Time all seem to have found their stature upgraded as the years have passed, but A Love Trilogy is always given short-shrift, IMHO. :-?

I still find the B-side of Love To Love You Baby rather weak, but I'm gonna play it repeatedly and see if it doesn't catch my attention more than it has in the past. AMG gives this b-side some glowing praise in thier review.

[Salsoul1975]

Marky,

I played A Love Trilogy last week, and I agree with you 100%. This is one of Miss Love-To-Love-You's best albums and consistent throughout. "Wasted" is probably my favorite song on the album. Her re-working of "Could It Be Magic" was awesome. All of the songs are excellent, and it is an upbeat album.

[DISCODISK]

its a bit like that here too MARKY all those wonderful songs baltimore- nina simone,whats going on -marvin gaye,etc thats only come with time.
the rock press hated disco when they reviewed the singles [the token few each week] they slated em,silver convention,baccara in particular had a rough ride
i used to read em for a laugh of couse i never purchased them i just read em in the shop and tossed em back
the one that stands out in my mind though is a mid 70s review of a stylistics record it simply said ..
NO BOLLOCKS STRIKES AGAIN!!!! :lol:

[Salsoul1975]

Marky,

I think the reason why the B-side of the Love To Love You Baby doesn't get a lot of respect is because it is not in the same vein as Side A. "Need-A-Man-Blues" is the only disco song on that side; the others are a cornucopia of country/western, A/C, and Spector-esque '60s-flavored pop. It was also a conceptual side, with each song about loneliness and/or despair. Ironically, it might have been a precursor to what she did on Bad Girls, with the third side consisting of a country/western tune ("On My Honor") and a few A/C songs ("There Will Always Be A You", "All Through The Night"). The closer on Side 3, the power ballad "My Baby Understands", is one of the strongest songs on that album.

[Nano]

Good work, Marky. However, you have to take into account that RS changed reviewers and scribes many times in the last 30 years.
Also, these guys that reappraise La Donna are the same guys that give 3 stars to N'Sync and Britney CDs... :roll:
RS isn't what it used to be. A couple of years ago, Jann Wenner himself came to visit the offices of the magazine in Buenos Aires (yes... we have a local version). After looking at past issues and the work done, his first question was: "how come you never put Britney Spears on the cover?"
OOOUCHHH!!! :o

[ol'skinflint]

funny how albums can go from crap to classic in the span of twenty years :P .. I'm glad to see Donna and Chic getting their due (finally).. I wonder how other disco albums/artists would fare under the same comparison.. Just goes to show that sometimes snobby critics wouldn't know a good thing if it kicked them in the ass..

Anyways my faves would be A Love Trilogy, Four Seasons Of Love, Bad Girls, The Wanderer, All Systems Go, Another Place And Time and (surprise) Mistaken Identity

I'm not so sure She Works Hard For The Money deserves the Four stars.. good song, but a mostly weak LP IMO :-?

From what I've observed personally, most often when critics call certain music crappy when it's released and then change their minds years later and praise it, it's because it was unexpectedly commercially successful. That's probably partially true in Donna Summer's case too, but they (critics not only of Summer's work but disco in general) simply can NOT deny Summer and disco's longlasting popularity. Touring disco artists still draw crowds, the music still ignites crowds in clubs, disco television shows are quite popular, and several artists have sampled and covered Donna Summer's songs. And I hear "We Are Family" as often today as when it was released. Certain styles of music have periods of being popular and unpopular, but to me, good music remains so regardless of how much time passes, and I couldn't care less what critics consider hip or square. My only frustration with disco is that so much of it remains unavailable or hard to find. I'm sooooooooooooooooo glad I kept most of my records.

[Salsoul Nugget]

Great work - interesting stuff. I think maybe a lot has to do with people today giving disco a little more credit than it was getting at the time and shortly after it's peak.

I've never really listened to her early albums in their entirely - but probably should - so I can only really comment on the SAW album "Another Place and Time" which was actually pretty good. "Loves about to change" is one of the most uplifting songs I've ever known.

[STEPHEN L FREEMAN]

Not much of her post-1980 work is in print. (Hard to say why; maybe God is punishing her for blaspheming her gay fans). :P

The fact that this long-ago debunked rumour is incorporated into a review, as late as 2004, shows that the "critic" didn't do their homework. Either get the facts right, or shut up.

As for the "Love To Love You" LP... Remember that the only complete version of the b-side, can be found on the German/Atlantic Records pressing. Originally, it's a bit more diverse than it sounded, after being re-vamped. And shows-off Donna's, pre-Disco, pop-music side.

Personally, I LOVE every track on the b-side of the "Try Me..." L.P.

[Westwood]

Hey guys, this thread makes for a very interesting discussion, in case you didn't have it before.
I personally cannot stand Rolling Stones' pretentiousness.
I find it kinda pathetic and annoying that they seem to have this "power" to be held as somewhat "the" critical appraisal that counts in the entertainment business. How did that happen?
The biggest question that seems to exist is: why is rock (rock, indie etc) more important/better/serious than pop/disco and other more pleasing sounds??????? This has ALWAYS bothered me so much.
This always comes up when you want to tell someone that you love disco, because all the studid comments arise, even if you're a newbie to disco and you're listening to Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive or whatever the "in" (cough) crowd consider to be disco's worst and only output, or you're very knowledgeable in disco, you get the same stupid response.
It's almost like an undying rumour like the ones that we wish would put to rest about DS, disco always gets bashed.
Isn't there a more pop-friendly music magazine that is highly regarded?
The only one I can maybe think of, just because Neil Tennant used to work there, is Smash Hits, however, not being in the UK and too young when it was in press (I think) I never bought it, and seeing some covers here and there, I hardly think it can be considered critical.
UK's NME is also another crappy paper, with snobs galore criticising everyone as it pleases them, and occasionally being total hypocrits when it's convenient to them.

Were most music magazines back then also this unfavorable to Donna Summer's work?
Because I think that in a way, while her and disco's work might have been re-evaluated over time, some may be influenced by the fact that her records were highly influentual indeed, but the newer reviews might be less objective because of that? I would be interested if those who gave her one star back then have changed their mind (that is if they can get over themselves).
I mean, we know that many things change as they are propagated by word of mouth, mistold stories, urban legends, some inaccurate facts that are propagated because they are told by someone or something, or influencial (movies etc, or period movies).
It would be nice to get a comprehensive objective point of view on her discography. Rolling Stone's can't be, I mean, there is way too much difference between those appraisals to be worth anything.

[EricHG23]

As for the "Love To Love You" LP... Remember that the only complete version of the b-side, can be found on the German/Atlantic Records pressing. Originally, it's a bit more diverse than it sounded, after being re-vamped. And shows-off Donna's, pre-Disco, pop-music side.

Personally, I LOVE every track on the b-side of the "Try Me..." L.P.

As do I

What was the original B side to Love to Love You? I knwo that Full of Emptiness (part 1, not part 2) was taken from Lady fo the Night her previous folk/pop record with Moroder and Belotte--cuz of rights issues it's not on the current version of Lady. I actually find Love's bside great and largely more interesting than Lady fo the Night (which I think is more o finterest cuz of her vocals and just to hear how quickly her and Moroder's sound changed) -- Need a Man Blues is a great early disco song, Pandora's Box a great belter, Full of Emptiness nice, and Whispering Waves magical

[Cdnbob]

Hey guys, this thread makes for a very interesting discussion, in case you didn't have it before.
I personally cannot stand Rolling Stones' pretentiousness.
I find it kinda pathetic and annoying that they seem to have this "power" to be held as somewhat "the" critical appraisal that counts in the entertainment business.

I think you have to take anything Rolling Stone says with a grain of salt and consider the source that its coming from. I don't think they've ever been fair to any performer they didn't consider proper rock n' roll or otherwise. Pesonally I don't hold their opinion as anything important or valuable.

[SandraDee]

Were most music magazines back then also this unfavorable to Donna Summer's work?

I always used to read Record Mirror & strangely enough the reviews in the main part of the mag (which were usually a bit anti-disco) often liked Donna's stuff but James Hamilton who wrote the disco page was often quite scathing of Donna's stuff, but then he wasn't really into commercial or euro type stuff generally.

[markydefad]

As I recall, Rolling Stone really heralded Donna Summer as an artist in their review for "Once Upon A Time"--the first time they really got her and raved about Giorgio and Donna...wonder if I can find that? :icon_question:

here's an article from Rolling Stone, March 23, 1978--mentions "Once Upon A Time"...but is not the LP review....

Rolling Stone March 23, 1978

Genre: R&B Item Number: 328251 magazine, SUMMER, DONNA: Rolling Stone, 3-23-78, issue #261, with Warren Zevon, Richard Perry, Son Seals, Waylon & Willie in New York, M- (like new) condition... .

[markydefad]

HAH! FOUND IT!!! And it's by one of my fave reviewers, Stephen Holden--who now writes movie reviews for the New York Times... [ afterthought: ok, he's a tad pretentious here I admit---ya gots to read it real slowly to attempt to understand some of it!!!] :icon_eek::icon_exclaim: :icon_lol:


Rolling Stone Review Of Once Upon A Time (1/12/78):


Once Upon a Time may be the ne plus ultra of disco albums. A four-sided, four-"act" mock opera loosely based on Cinderella, it marks another technological triumph for Munich-based producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte and for chameleon-voiced Donna Summer, who emerges as both the Diana Ross and the Bette Midler of disco and as one of pop culture's all-time camp divas.


By blending sex and science fiction, Moroder and Bellotte have developed the aural counterparts to the visual imagery of discotheques. But the sex is of the skinflick variety, and the science fiction, pulp. Barry White's softcore bubblings seeded this erotic Muzak, and Moroder and Bellotte have brought it to full flower. Their synthesizer-based disco is the music of the brave new world—music with a capacity to suggest comic-book erotic/astral configurations, limited only by the studio and synthesizer technologies that produce and reproduce it.


Using Donna Summer as a pansexual, Barbarella-style fantasy object, Moroder's and Bellotte's camp eroticism pulls humor out of the gap between pornography's fantasy of sexual insatiability and actual human sexual capacity. Summer's first hit, "Love to Love You Baby," fused Barry White's pseudoorgasmic approach with the synthesized Eurodisco style heralded by the Silver Convention's "Fly, Robin, Fly." "Love to Love You Baby" not only paved the way toward a more blatant eroticism, it exhibited a nearly total fragmentation of narrative musical structure and signaled disco's break from short radio forms to longer, more organic structures. In their next two albums with Summer, Moroder and Bellotte padded the chant with a diaphanous gloss and fluffed out the fantasy of perpetual gratification with love-comic scenarios. I Remember Yesterday finally revealed Summer as not just a centerfold gasp but a brassy pop/soul stylist in the Bette Midler-Melissa Manchester mold. But the album's signal achievement was "I Feel Love," in which they underlined Summer's dreamy vocals with jittery, diamond-hard synthesizer rhythms accented by a whiplash.


With Once upon a Time, Moroder-Bellotte-Summer diversify even further. Three sides—acts one, two and four—feature several styles of propulsive dance music designed for disco play. But act three is mostly R&B pop and contains two of the strongest nondisco cuts of Summer's career. "A Man like You" offers a clever pastiche of Gene Page's arrangement for "Get Closer." "Sweet Romance," a pop/soul tear-jerker with a catchy tune, has Summer hilariously praying to "father dear," with a quasi-baroque harpsichord behind her.


What comes as a surprise is how the ominously surreal atmosphere of the album's best disco sections belies the light escapism of the Cinderella concept. The feverish momentum in act one's most powerful segue — "Faster and Faster to Nowhere" and "Fairy Tale High"—suggests frantic stimulation rather than gleeful excitement, with the nightmarish intensity enhanced by sped-up vocals and dissonant textures. In the first two cuts of act two—the most consistent side—a softer variant of the jittery synthesizer on "I Feel Love" punctuates an echoed chorus that responds to Summer's obsessive interior monologue and implies schizophrenia.


Could Once upon a Time be a critique of the voluptuary subculture that is sure to devour it like candy? Or is the downswing of the roller coaster just the headiest part of the kick? In his synthesized solo album, From Here to Eternity, Moroder evoked a deep, empty space beyond the erotic. Although Once upon a Time isn't so weird, it's just as cool. Moroder's and Bellotte's aural style equates glamor and shallowness with such a glacial detachment that it seems sadistic. The music reflects the tawdry, orgy-palace atmosphere—Versailles for the masses—that stands for elegance in the disco business, and then refrains from animating that atmosphere with a single drop of warmth; instead it pricks and mocks.

How could Moroder and Bellotte not be aware of the implications of their eroticized space music? Their work with Summer suggests a climate in which eroticism has been debased, exploited and placed under such close technological scrutiny that its value can only be redeemed by fantasy. But fantasy, being susceptible to commercial manipulation, can also fail; hence its elaboration to often desperate extremes. Having moved from simple orgasmic chant to Cinderella-turned-insideout in the fun house, Moroder and Bellotte seem to be tracing this fantasy cycle themselves. How much farther will they go, can they go? Of course, the fun house is supposed to be a little scary. Isn't sex more erotic when spiced with a sense of danger? But how much danger? Isn't it possible that when the fun house and the fake monsters were built, a real one got locked inside?

That's one question Once upon a Time won't answer, because like all camp, it's far too knowing to venture a straightforward opinion on anything. Like a fun house mirror, it gives back a distorted reflection, and if you don't like one, there's always the next mirror and the next.... (RS 256)

STEPHEN HOLDEN

[markydefad]

No reviews for "Love To Love You Baby" or "A Love Trilogy"---but lookee here what I found....and it's by Vince Aletti, Record World's reviewer!!!!

Rolling Stone Review Of Four Seasons Of Love (1/27/77):


Like Donna Summer's previous American releases, Love to Love You Baby and A Love Trilogy, Four Seasons of Love is an extended exercise in ecstasy, but where the earlier albums had sustained their lush, throbbing title tracks for one entire side, pushing the long LP cut to its logical extreme, here the whole album is one continuous song cycle. Four Seasons traces the blossoming and eventual withering of a love affair from the exhilarating "Spring Affair" through the steamy, passionate "Summer Fever" and ominous "Autumn Changes" to a crisp, lovely end in "Winter Melody," which blends back into a reprise of "Spring" and the promise of a new affair. The music is one unbroken landscape, interrupted only by the changing of sides.


Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, who produce Summer's records in Germany with the "Munich Machine," Europe's answer to MFSB, again mesh the orgasmic ebb and flow of lovemaking with the euphoric energy of disco dancing, creating the perfect pulsing back drop to Summer's breathy, seething vocals. The songs build and break, surging on clean sweeps of violins, but because they ease off before reaching a climax, Summer and the orchestra are able to keep it up indefinitely without dissipating the record's vibrant energy. For some, the format must seem confining, but on the dance floor or in the bedroom—Summer's main spheres of influence—this kind of creative foreplay is so rich in nuance and texture that other considerations are swept aside. (RS 231)

VINCE ALETTI

[EricHG23]

Wow that's one of the few reviews *from the time* that seemed to really give Once Upon a Time credit. Of course now there have been some amazing reviews, but at the time the album seemed to go unoticed by mainstream magazines (maybe because it didn't have any major singles--I Love You was hardly another I Feel Love or Love to Love You Baby) or else they completely didn't "get" it. Thanks for that great review!

Salsoul said (and some time ago so he may have changed his opinion):

"Disco has withstood the test of time because it was a universal genre and had little to no use for pretension. The rock music that the critics masturbated with more than 30 years ago has metamorphosized into loud, screeching, blistering junk with no substance. It seems their current re-thinking of disco is just as well; realizing that the public's undying appetite for disco outlived any of their own predictions. "

See while a part of me would liek to agree with that... Unless I find some kind of music personally offensive (as I do certain more ohomophobic or misogynistic genres) I'm wary of calling anything "blistering junk with no substance". I already have a hard enough time finding people who dont' find it odd that my CD collection is so perceivably schizophrenic--tons of classical music, especially early 20th century, probably about 50 CDs for my fave composer Stephen Sondheim and his shows, endless disco, etc etc. The disco critics are the ones who called disco junk with no substance... While I'm not a big rock fan and yeah, I like much disco a lot more, I do like some rock (even some modern "tuneless" rock ;) ) and I think it's dangerous to write off a whole genre the way many did with disco.

[markydefad]

Rolling Stone Review Of I Remember Yesterday (8/11/77):


Don't let the title cut put you off. "I Remember Yesterday" appears to be a plagiarism of the sound and mannerisms of Dr. Buzzard's Original "Savannah" Band, but the steal is so complete that all those woozy clarinets and disco-ized big-band riffs become Summer's own. The rest of the album, however, is the luxurious stretching out of a performer just beginning to realize her strengths and possibilities.


Summer's achievement on I Remember Yesterday is a unique use of Sixties soul moods sewn to trenchant Seventies dance rhythms. "Love's Unkind" is the best example, featuring Summer as a one-woman Martha and the Vandellas and a drum hook that is nearly profound. This slides into "Back in Love Again," the sort of song the original Supremes might be recording now.


Summer's sexual breathiness has evolved into a sensual croon that exudes both power and vulnerability. The thrill of the final song, "I Feel Love," is as much in its arrangement as in Summer's soaring vocal, the entire production built as it is upon a frenetic Moog bass line punctuated by what sounds like a whip cracking against concrete.


I Remember Yesterday is clearly meant to be the album to move Summer as both singer and songwriter beyond disco classification. It succeeds with ease. (RS 245)

KEN TUCKER

[markydefad]

Rolling Stone Review Of Live And More (12/14/78):


If disco weren't such a limiting genre, Donna Summer might have already been recognized as the Diana Ross of the Seventies. Besides a fine, dramatic voice, immense charm and unusually tasteful technical control, she's got a little bit of what made Ross special: an erotic, bitchy sullenness, perpetually threatening to break through the slick pop surface of her music. To Summer's credit, ever since "Love to Love You, Baby" made her a star, she's tried her best to escape the disco sex-doll image it created. She's done this most notably with the fairy-tale concept album, Once upon a Time, a sizable portion of which is reprised on side one of Live and More.

While the Once upon a Time material is more than adequate, it's side two that really shows Summer at her grandest–as an old-fashioned soul singer out of early Sixties Motown, with tips of the hat to straight pop and blues. Whenever she gets away from the strictures of disco, she can be quite extraordinary. She moves easily from the bouncy wit of "Only One Man" to the raunchy blues funk of "Some of These Days," and redeems even the high-class kitsch of "The Way We Were" with an all-out torchsinger's passion that easily surpasses Barbra Streisand's rather mannered original.


Though the hits are exiled to side three, they come across fairly well (especially the sweeping, irresistible "Last Dance"). The exception, of course, is "Love to Love You, Baby," a tune that caused snickers when first released. Now, mercifully reduced to three minutes, it just sounds embarrassing. Side four is a big studio-production number, "MacArthur Park Suite," that contains an interminable discofied version of the Jimmy Webb song as well as some new material, all of which is pretty ghastly. Like "Love to Love You, Baby," it too seems a relic of some other time–a time that one hopes will soon be forgotten should Donna Summer continue to develop the enormous potential as a pop stylist she displays so often on Live and More. (RS 280)


TOM CARSON

[markydefad]

Rolling Stone Review Of Bad Girls (7/12/79):



Had it been trimmed from two discs to one, Donna Summer's Bad Girls could have been an end-of-the-decade, Seventies masterpiece, seizing and encapsulating this moment in pop history. Even with side three's ultraschlock ballads and side two's erratic rockdisco cuts, it still ranks as the only great disco album other than Saturday Night Fever. Indeed, Bad Girls picks up where the John Travolta movie's sentimentalized, everybody's-a-star pop philosophy left off. If everyone's a star, it follows that everyone's also a commercial product, right? If that's true, where do you draw the line between being a self-created object of erotic fantasy and a hooker?


The notion that the world's a brothel is hardly new to pop music. Bette Midler gets a lot of laughs from imitating a bawd, and, on Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, Joni Mitchell paralleled imperialism to prostitution. Donna Summer, however, doesn't exploit the sexual jungle for humor or "art," but for sheer raunchy exuberance. In a move as naive as it is audacious, the singer herself writhes on the auction block, playing as hot-to-trot a streetwalker as ever sashayed down Broadway. Though the concept isn't developed as consistently as it might have been—the hooker-slanted tunes are interspersed with conventional love songs — Bad Girls amounts to a virtual paean to commercial sex.


Summer's vocals are wonderfully right for the part, and she stretches her chameleonlike voice to new limits, adding the role of rock & roll singer to her already established sex-kitten and Las Vegas-schlockmistress poses. The breakthrough cut is "Hot Stuff," a sizzling plea for action, whose slightly retarded, toughened disco rhythm and stinging Jeff Baxter guitar solo suggest Foreigner-style rock, without rutting the energy in metallic sludge. Summer's characteristic coyness is replaced by a hard-boiled, street-cookie directness that makes Linda Ronstadt seem positively demure.


The energy and fun are magnificently sustained on sides one and four. "Bad Girls," with its nifty "beep-beep, toot-toot" chant/hook, cheerfully evokes the trashflash vitality of tawdry disco dolls cruising down the main drag on Saturday night. The streamlined pop swing of "Love Will Always Find You" and "Walk Away" smoothly integrates Maria Muldaur-like nostalgia into the pop-disco mainstream. Summer's never sounded this playful and sophisticated. "Dim All the Lights" flaunts a saucy, Latin-flavored proposition, while "Our Love" is the apotheosis of every Sixties girl-group tear-jerker, updated for disco. Wailing in front of discofied African drums, Donna Summer sounds like the Shirelles reincarnated as a mightily love-struck Bionic Woman. In "Lucky," the pulpy saga of a one-nighter, the singer meows in front of a plunging, suction-cup synthesizer whose salacious slavering practically defines lasciviousness.


The closest thing to a social comment on Bad Girls comes in "Sunset People," a sweeping, high-rise view of Hollywood. Against an icy refrain of "doin' it right — night after night," the song telescopes the nightmarish glamour world of the Sunset Strip—with its teenage prostitutes, billboards, foreign cars and star worship — into an evocation of pleasureseeking as cold as it is tantalizing. If there's a moral here, it's in the music's ominous suggestion of the boredom beyond glitter and in the lyrics' telegraphed equation of the disco ethos with Hollywood and hooking. "Sunset People" just might be the disco culture's "A Day in the Life."


In one of the photos on the LP's inner sleeve, Donna Summer's co-producer, Giorgio Moroder, poses as her pimp. That's as good a metaphor as any for their musical interaction. Moroder's technique simultaneously mocks and exalts the star, who becomes both a goddess and a sideshow attraction in a futuristic technosex amusement park. Though this record's production contains nothing as startlingly novel as the sequenced bass synthesizer of "I Feel Love," the best tracks strike a perfect blend of German Eurodisco and American rock and soul that ultimately transcends the disco environment. Bad Girls' aural style is a lot sparer than the mechanized swirls of "Mac-Arthur Park Suite" and Once upon a Time....The new album's sound effects — e.g., the backward tape loops that sound like speeding cars in "Sunset People"— seem integral to the material.
Bad Girls' only serious lapse is side three, which consists of four sappy ballads, all of them cowritten by Summer. Working with lyrics that are embarrassingly mawkish, the singer overemotes in a painfully flat, syrupy sob, while the Eurodisco-pop synthesis that works so beautifully elsewhere collapses completely in these lengthy, unstructured weepers.


Such gross miscalculation shouldn't really come as a surprise, however, since Summer is truly a left-field phenomenon. Like Marilyn Monroe, whom she consciously emulates, Donna Summer is a gigantic but primitive talent whose reckless abandon and astonishing innocence (dumbness?) are two sides of the same coin. How else could she give herself so totally to the role of sex symbol? Summer is the Fifties' child-woman sexual ideal "liberated" into a Seventies, multiorgasmic Cosmopolitan clone — an inflatable sex machine as insatiable as she is helpless. But like Monroe, Summer also remains a true naif. She's more a monstrous reflection than a cynical projection of our collective libido. I guess the souls of our archetypes don't change, only their manners.


Two records ago, on Once upon a Time..., Donna Summer turned Cinderella into a disco fable. On Bad Girls, Cinderella has grown up to be a whore, and Prince Charming a john. Nowadays there's a ball every night down at the discothèque, and Happily Ever After is just another low-priced "zipless ****." (RS 295)

STEPHEN HOLDEN

[markydefad]

All in all, although I haven't read every world--the damn reviews were very favorable to all her LPs--yet the Rolling Stone Record Guides mostly sneered--but note that the reviewers of the individual LPs [Stephen Holden/Vince Aletti/Ken Tucker/Tom Carson] were prone to like disco [I know several of them are gay men]....while the compilers of the books did not.

Mad Props to this website where I found this stuff:

http://superbulletnumberone.com/id232.html

[markydefad]

Wow that's one of the few reviews *from the time* that seemed to really give Once Upon a Time credit. Of course now there have been some amazing reviews, but at the time the album seemed to go unoticed by mainstream magazines (maybe because it didn't have any major singles--I Love You was hardly another I Feel Love or Love to Love You Baby) or else they completely didn't "get" it. Thanks for that great review!

My pleasure Eric. I'm amazed with the content also---I'm at work [and not actually working!! HAH! BUSTED!!! ] ..have to read them in full tonight.

[Salsoul1975]

Salsoul said (and some time ago so he may have changed his opinion):

"Disco has withstood the test of time because it was a universal genre and had little to no use for pretension. The rock music that the critics masturbated with more than 30 years ago has metamorphosized into loud, screeching, blistering junk with no substance. It seems their current re-thinking of disco is just as well; realizing that the public's undying appetite for disco outlived any of their own predictions. "

OMG.....I totally forgot that I had written that! Thanks Eric for bringing back a memory.

My views haven't changed regarding what I said, and while reading the reviews of Donna's albums from Four Seasons Of Love to Bad Girls, yes, the pretensiousness of the rock critic you can cut with the dullest knife abounds. Naturally, these reviews are not for the common man who appreciates music by the way it sounds, perhaps with the lyrics but more so with the former.

This reminds me of a RS critic who said (paraphrasing here), when reviewing Marvin Gaye's I Want You album, that Gaye must have been recording the album a few doors down from Donna Summer (mind you, this was most likely written in 1976).

Shame on the critic who said that side three of Bad Girls was "shlock"; you said you wanted Donna to be versatile, well there it is!