Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post:
Donna Summer, who died Thursday, was the undisputed monarch of a musical genre that I tried my best to hate. Disco had none of the spontaneity and rough edges of rock-and-roll, none of the rawness and authenticity of rhythm and blues, and yet it emerged from those sources like some sort of genetic anomaly. Disco was slick, polished, relentless. Intellectually, it was boring.
Viscerally, it was irresistible. To be on a dance floor in the late 1970s, before the mirrored ball became a cliche, was to be assaulted by thumping bass and screaming synthesizers until you surrendered and let the music carry you along. For all its space-age sheen, disco was all about music’s most ancient and primal element, the beat. It was about becoming what diva Grace Jones called a “slave to the rhythm.” Harmony and melody, for most artists, were afterthoughts.
But not for Donna Summer. Only a handful had the pipes to sing with expressiveness, subtlety and control above the clamorous frenzy of a disco groove, and Summer was one of them. Her voice had what seemed like effortless power. You got the sense that if she wanted to crank it up, she could blow any band right off the stage.
And she had something to say. Songs such as “Bad Girls,” “Hot Stuff” and “She Works Hard for the Money” were anthems to female empowerment and sexual liberation. Whether she was playing the role of a saucy streetwalker, a club-hopping adventuress or an Everywoman shouldering the burdens of the world, she was always the protagonist, never the victim. “When I’m bad,” she famously sang, “I’m so, so bad.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/disco-queen-and-go-go-king/2012/05/17/gIQAb8MkWU_story.html?hpid=z2
