#11 - I Feel Love / Donna Summer

When Brian Eno first heard 'I Feel Love' by Donna Summer, produced by Giorgio Moroder in 1977, he declared that he had 'heard the sound of the future'. It was the first pop song to be entirely produced on a synthesiser and quickly came to be seen as an important milestone in the history of record production, pointing the way forward to the dominance of electronic technology in the decades following its release. Equally, it's a song which was immediately embraced by gay clubbing communities; when Sam Smith recorded their cover of it in 2019, they could describe it as a 'queer anthem'. In this episode, the first of a new series focussing on songs from the 1970s and 80s, I ask what it is about 'I Feel Love' which has inspired these responses and what might link these two key strands of its history.

All the songs discussed in this episode, including the original recording of 'I Feel Love' can be heard here. The theme from A Clockwork Orange is not on Spotify but at the time of writing can be found here. If you've enjoyed the episode please leave a review on Apple podcasts. Thank you.

With very special thanks to Paul Wierdak, the producer of this episode. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the first episode of a new series of the Secret Life of Songs - a podcast on what happens in pop songs and why they mean so much to us, with me, Anthony, a musician who writes and performs under the name sky coloured. 

Possibly no single record embodied the breathless sense of the new which arrived with electronic music-making like Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, produced by Giorgio Moroder on a Moog synthesiser in 1977, prompting Brian Eno, then working at the Hansa Studios in Berlin with David Bowie, to declare, ‘I have heard the sound of the future’. Robert Moog may have invented his first synthesiser in 1964, but it was not until the 1970s and 80s that synths, and related electronic instruments like the sampler and the drum machine, became widely-available retail items. They were rapidly adopted by a wide variety of musicians who with this new technology not only overhauled the sonic palette of popular music but presented a wholesale challenge to the dominance of tonality - the relationships of notes and chords in the major and minor keys of Western music - in our understanding of how music does what it does. They did this not, as an earlier generation of art composers had done, by seeking to eliminate tonality entirely, but by creating such radically different ways of producing tones that notes would not sound like notes, they would dissolve and blur into each other, startling listeners by the vividly strange nature of their sound even when using standard pitches of the traditional western scales. I’m interested in both the ways that this record - which foregrounded synthesised sound as no pop song had ever done - heralded the future to its first listeners but also in its historic embrace by gay clubbing communities, such that the singer Sam Smith, who covered the song in 2019, could describe it as a ‘queer anthem’, and what might link these two strands of its history. 

Moog’s synthesiser was an astonishing piece of musical engineering which, at a stroke, pioneered several of the definitive technologies of all subsequent sound synthesis, including the manner of sound creation itself: his voltage-controlled oscillators generated waveforms of various kinds, the most basic of which is the sine wave. The synthesiser sends this signal through a series of modules, including other oscillators, which combine the initial tone with other soundwaves, and filters, which shape the sound by removing selected frequencies, to produce more complex sounds of practically limitless variety. In this way, the synthesiser is a realisation of a thesis made by the French mathematician Joseph Fournier in the early nineteenth-century. He was the first to understand that all the sounds in nature, including those made on acoustic musical instruments, are in fact ‘complex sounds’, so-called because they are combinations of simpler sounds, or what sound scientists now call ‘partials’.  If you were able to isolate a particular partial it would, by itself, sound a single pure frequency, or what we now recognise as a sine wave. Synthesis allows us to construct entirely new tones from the most basic building block of sound, an extraordinary revolution in music technology which has led to many of the most distinctive musical creations of the last half-century.

This piece, the theme from 1971’s A Clockwork Orange, was an electronic arrangement of Henry Purcell’s 1695 Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, by the composer Wendy Carlos, who had released the first best-selling record featuring a synthesiser, also an adaptation from classical music, 1968’s Switched-On Bach. This album was a crucial moment in the development of electronic music, transforming the perception of the synthesiser as something purely for experimenters and the avant-garde to an instrument that musicians across genre boundaries wanted access to: the celebrity pianist Glenn Gould praised it, as did Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who called it ‘one of the most electrifying albums I ever heard’. It also brought the possibilities of the Moog synthesiser to the attention of Munich-based Italian music producer, Giorgio Moroder, who initially would use a Moog only for quirky sonic effects on otherwise conventionally-produced disco records. It wasn’t until ‘I Feel Love’ that he would make the decision to create the entirety of a track’s arrangement on the Moog, and its characteristic shimmering, shifting tones are heard right from the song’s outset.

It starts with long expansive open chords, taking twenty seconds before we hear any third - the note which would indicate whether the song’s key is major or minor - these chords which omit the third are called ‘open fifths’, and although the bassline adds a flattened seventh, the impression is still one of openness and emotional ambiguity. A long Eb finally enters, completing the minor triad, but as it’s being produced on a synthesiser, a filter is applied to it as it proceeds, and the note seems to morph, brightening and almost breaking up, before an E natural enters in the same manner, changing the chord from minor to major. [demo] There’s an allusion at work here to a tone poem by the composer Richard Strauss, Also sprach Zarathustra, enduringly associated in popular culture with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the opening of ‘Sunrise’, the first section of Strauss’s piece, is heard over the famous transition from an image of an ape throwing a bone into the air to a shot of a spaceship floating serenely in space. The same harmonic scheme is present: wide open fifth chords under-pinning a simple melody shifting between the minor and major thirds of the tonic chord. Perhaps there’s also something in Strauss’s grandiose, visceral timpani part which resides in Giorgio Moroder’s thudding, relentless kick drum pattern, but more than this, the key connection between the two pieces is the promise of the future. ‘I Feel Love’ built on a pre-existing affinity between electronically-produced music and science fiction: listeners growing up in the 1960s and 70s were likely to have first encountered synthesised sound in soundtracks created for representations of outer space in TV and film, the most famous of which being Delia Derbyshire’s rendition of the Doctor Who theme in 1963. In 1956, Forbidden Planet became the first film to feature an entirely electronically-produced score; it was seen by musicians such as John Foxx, future lead singer of the British electro-pop band Ultravox, who has said that, for him, ‘after that movie, electronics were forever connected with sci-fi and otherworldliness’. The connection extended into the apex of the disco era: when John Travolta steps onto the famous illuminated dance floor in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, he does so in a club named ‘2001 Odyssey’. 

And so when Summer and Moroder were making a concept album based around decades - each song on I Remember Yesterday combines disco with a pastiche of a different musical period, starting in the 1940s - and they came to consider the final track, which was to represent the future, the decision to avoid traditional instruments and base the track on electronic sound alone came naturally; and this basic idea was the starting point of ‘I Feel Love’. 

The harmonic structure of the song, once Summer starts singing, is built around blocky parallel movement: 8 bars of C7 simply shifts a minor third upwards towards 4 bars of Eb7, 4 bars of F7 and 8 bars of G7. This sequence is then played in a compressed form in the chorus: 1 bar C7, 1 bar Eb7, 1 bar F7, 1 bar G7. The effect, clearly, is one of rising, drawn attention to by these unprepared chordal shifts upwards, and of that excitement intensifying, when the sequence is heard at four times the original rate in the chorus. The melody Summer sings in the verses offsets this by being based around a falling pattern: the long note at the start of each phrase allows Summer to express a powerful yearning which seems to dissipate in each downward flutter, a dissipation which is always reversed when the next phrase starts: a repetition but at a higher pitch, and we understand that her feeling has only intensified. 

The combination of that particular melodic shape - a bold high note held for more than a bar’s length followed by a quick descent into the lower register - and a harmonic pattern which surges inexorably upwards, all undergirded by the track’s relentless pulsing groove, is, to my ear, a brilliant musical representation of dancing with someone you want to sleep with, but it’s also curiously depersonalised - the placement of her vocals moves around the stereo field, even splits across it, with a number of different Summers popping up, right and left, as the song proceeds. She is not addressing a particular person. This is unlike some of her earlier funk-inspired singles like 1975’s ‘Love to Love You Baby’, which is addressed to a specific individual:

The lyrics of this song, which itself broke new ground in recording history by being one of the longest single pop tracks ever made, influencing the development of the longer-form records of house and techno, offer a glimpse into the intimacy of the singer and the ‘you’ of the title; the verses pay tribute to the power and appeal of a particular partner. In ‘I Feel Love’, this intimate, personal relationship is dissolved into a fluid sensuality which swims around the record’s sonic space, suffusing it with erotic energy; not landing on any particular object of desire, rather encompassing the entire implied space of its happening: the dance floor.

It’s worth mentioning here just what sort of dance floors would have first shook to the sounds Summer and Moroder were making in the 1970s. Although disco had by the time of the release of ‘I Feel Love’ become thoroughly mainstream music, the genre had its origins in gay and lesbian nightclubs in a number of American cities, and in particular, New York. The connection was never lost on disco’s detractors whose condemnations of it often carried homophobic overtones, as in the notorious ‘Disco Sucks’ campaign, which culminated in a riot in Chicago in July 1979, after a crate of disco records had been torched during an interval at a Chicago White Sox baseball game. The criminalisation of homosexuality in the US had intensified in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The 1920s had seen drag balls held in public establishments, harassed only by social purity organisations and largely left alone by the police. LGBT baby boomers, on the other hand, came of age in an era when it had become a criminal offence for men to be seen dancing together; bars which allowed this were regularly raided. Although this astonishing example of state repression was technically revoked in New York in 1968, the music historian Alice Echols has written that more often than not the New York City police simply acted as if it was still illegal and raided gay nightclubs regularly. One club, she writes, ‘the Stonewall Inn … quickly developed a loyal clientele because it was the only gay bar in New York City that as a matter of course permitted dancing between men … the bar was raided on June 27, 1969. This was hardly the first time that the police hit the Stonewall, but it was the first time that they had not given advance notice to the management. And it was the first time that gays, angry about being treated like scum, fought back’. This event, subsequently known as the Stonewall Riots, is widely considered a watershed moment in the modern gay rights movement, and offers a hint as to why the bond between dancing and gay identity has been so strong. Echols writes, however, that the link goes beyond this historical connection, arguing that the dance floor itself was a ‘site of transformation’, that it was a place, simply due to its imperative to dance, where gay men and women confronted their ‘own sexual inhibitions and internalised homophobia’. I want to ask: what role, if any, was the music playing in these countless moments of changing consciousness?

Moroder by this point had an intuitive sense of what worked in the long sets DJs were putting on in discos across Europe and the US so when it came to the innovative process behind ‘I Feel Love’ he was able to make something compulsively danceable as well as uncompromisingly new. The engineer Robby Wedel demonstrated to him how to bind the many musical layers to a click track - a metronome - thereby keeping all the elements of the arrangement in time. This mechanisation of the rhythm section - the drums, percussion, bassline, and chords - produces an exhilaratingly machinic, propulsive energy: the bassline has a stereo delay effect applied throughout, which provides the underlying groove. 

I’ll demonstrate this by first playing the basic bassline [demo] and then its delay [demo] both centrally in the stereo field, and then switch them to opposite sides, left and right [demo]

Over this fundamental groove Moroder layers extremely precise polyrhythmic patterns, some on recognisable chord tones, some simply percussive noises.

So much of the hostility towards electronic music production, when it was first popularised, was based around the idea that it was unnatural, synthetic, inhuman, but this record, to my ear, contains an abundance of the life force which electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani was getting at when she described her first interactions with synthesisers: ‘these instruments … they’re sensual … the machine was alive, it was warm, it communicated, it was sensitive … one of the most amazing experiences you can have is to be in the middle of this sound that’s moving … the thing that I’ve always loved about electronic music is that it’s in motion, it’s malleable … in electronics you’re not dealing so literally with the architecture of notes, or harmonies, those building blocks of classical music, you’re dealing in energy’.

And when she talks about the ‘sound that’s moving’, the malleability of pitch and tone that synthesis affords, we can think of those long minor and major thirds in the intro of ‘I Feel Love’, which may look like single, stable notes when notated, but which perceptually are anything but stable: they emerge, evolve and almost come apart across their duration before emerging again, in a different form. The whole interest is not in the notes as notes but in what is audibly happening to their sound as electronic processing is applied to them over time, and it’s in this that we find another clue to the deep affinity of this record to queer experience and identity. In her book Metamorphoses, the philosopher Rosi Braidotti asserts that ‘becoming’ is the key challenge queer theory directs at traditional understandings of identity: she writes that queer experience reveals ‘the subject as a dynamic and changing entity. The definition of a person’s identity takes place in between nature-technology, male-female, black-white, in the spaces that flow and connect in between’. 

And it’s in this principle of ‘becoming’, of finding that one’s selfhood exists in between traditional definitions, that we find a clue as to why the techno-futurist implications of the sound of ‘I Feel Love’, and indeed of synthesised music in general, chimed so easily and powerfully with those for whom the traditional fixed categories of gender and sexuality were never applicable. The signifiers of authenticity held up by rock traditionalists who hated electronic music - say, Jimmy Page wielding his Gibson Les Paul as Robert Plant gave us a ‘whole lotta love’ - were, to members of any group which did not subscribe to heterosexual norms, instinctively suspect - impressions of a form of desire and gender implicitly regressive and exclusionary. Recently, as in the 2021 documentary Sisters with Transistors, it’s become commonplace to point out that electronic music-making was an area where women composers, as well as those of non-binary genders, could build a reputation, as it was historically dismissed and poorly understood by the overwhelmingly male musical centres of power. I wonder, however, if there’s something else about synthesis, beyond this, and beyond the basic sense of liberation from traditional musical methods virtually all early electronic pioneers reported, which was exciting to people such as Wendy Carlos, who, as we’ve heard, had inspired Moroder with her use of the Moog synthesiser on her album, Switched-On Bach. She made the record between 1967 and 68, as she was undergoing gender reassignment treatment. When you see Carlos explaining how to use oscillators to produce different tones and how these tones can be altered over time, it’s clear how this ability to shape a sound in minute detail, to radically alter it so that the most basic sonic material possible can quickly become something rich and distinctly ‘other’ than its starting form, was exhilarating to her on a very basic level, an exhilaration which has powerful utopian overtones - a sense that all these new tools and methods anticipate freedom from something.

Carlos, in fact, had worked with Moog on the development of his synthesiser, suggesting several significant innovations, including making the keys of its keyboard touch-sensitive, so that the sound reflected how hard you pressed the note, and a portamento control, which meant that when you changed notes they did not simply sound one after the other but rather slid between them, innovations which further dissolved the discreteness of the instrument’s individual tones. Sound synthesis reveals the organisation of sound into the notes represented by a piano keyboard - the ‘equal-tempered’ scales of major and minor - as just one system among many; a system of categorisation so deeply embedded as to seem not merely the ‘natural’ way of thinking about music but virtually synonymous with music itself. 

The promise of physical and sexual liberation, enabled by new technology, which, in their very different ways, featured in the work of both Carlos and Moroder, was the theme of Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 feminist classic, The Dialectic of Sex. It was Firestone who put these utopian hopes around technology and what it might mean for women into words, stating that ‘the cultural and technological preconditions now exist that make the elimination of sexual inequality possible’. Clearly, such an elimination is yet to be realised, but the link between the idea of technological progress and the prospect of emancipation from restrictive notions of gender and sex persists, because of the fundamental insight a record such as ‘I Feel Love’ hints at: that no form of desire is wholly ‘natural’, that human interaction has always been mediated by technology, and that the rhetoric of ‘natural desire’ has very often been leveraged to ostracise those for whom love does not take the form society’s self-identifying representatives of normalcy believe it should take. ‘I Feel Love’ proudly and compellingly expresses unnatural desire - desire shot through with technological mediation - desire which exists outside of what Braidotti calls the ‘naturalistic paradigm’. The loss of ‘naturalness’ which is tangibly, even gloriously, represented in the song honours her belief that such an absence is ‘not a melancholy plunge into loss and decline, but rather a joyful opening up of new possibilities’.

Look again at the lyrics of ‘I Feel Love’ - the repetition and lack of identifying detail raises the song to an expression of transcendent abstract desire, even before the language dissolves into sensual grammarless phrases: ‘fall and free/you and me’: ‘It’s so good/I’m in love/I feel love’. Is this addressed to a man or a woman? Are we meant to understand that they’re making love in the moment of singing or is the singer anticipating it happening? Or is she reminiscing after the event? The answer to all these questions, of course, is that we don’t know and we’re not meant to know; the song encompasses all these possibilities and more; much like Moroder’s diffusion of Summer’s vocals across the sonic space, the lyrics depersonalise - and universalise - the song’s expression of desire. 

And finally, if we think about the musical context we hear these intimations of desire in - a pulsing, ever-evolving synthesised cascade of sound - we can acknowledge what’s probably most obvious about ‘I Feel Love’ - the fact that it’s a dance song, not simply - or even primarily - an artefact to be listened to and admired. Electronic dance music rejects the basic principles of the concert hall tradition, and its products have a different ontological status - they indicate a whole setting and ethos, and with it a set of actions and behaviours; they embody the world they invite the listener/dancer into. On the dance floor, ‘I Feel Love’’s truest environment, we move our bodies in its pulsating sonic space, seduced by it in the sense of being willingly changed by it, becoming something other and less static than the self we were before entering. As the philosopher Patricia MacCormack writes, 'Seduction is not a desire to know or assimilate the other, it wants the other to change us and us to change the quality of the other to create a unique hybrid’. For a few moments, the song provides us with the experience of being between states, of travelling across given boundaries, of being hybrid. It allows us to feel identity as an ongoing process not held onto as a disembodied and unchanging formula; rather like our desires, our identity is something never fully known or mastered; it is constantly becoming itself and then something else.

Next time on the Secret Life of Songs I’ll be talking about family and how it’s put under the microscope in Sly and the Family Stone’s great song, ‘Family Affair’. Released in 1971, it asks questions which resonate throughout the rest of the era this series is focussed on: who is our family? What do we owe them? What holds us together when promises are broken and lives fall apart?

This episode was produced by Paul Wierdak. If you're enjoying the series please consider rating and reviewing it wherever you get your podcasts.