Donna Summer: The sonic seduction lives on in today's beats

As the song hit, the women's liberation movement and ideas of female sexuality were expanding; X-rated movie houses were screening underground hit films such as  'Deep Throat' and 'Behind the Green Door,' and in the discotheques and loft parties in New York City, a gay night-life culture was pushing the envelope too.

Summer won five Grammy Awards over her four-decade career, sold an estimated 130 million albums, became the first musician to land three double albums at the top of the charts, appeared in movies and on television, and, through her work with Moroder and beyond, helped push pop music into the digital age.

Her long string of hits stretched from the 1970s through the '80s. 'Bad Girls,' 'She Works Hard for the Money,' 'On the Radio,' among them, were in heavy rotation when they came out and remain in heavy rotation on classics stations. Her voice, with sharp phrasing and an ability to deliver emotional heft with a few subtle vocal nuances, could whisper and command with equal grace. She even managed to transform the strange 1960s standard 'MacArthur Park' into a dance-floor hit.

VIDEO: Classic Donna Summer

From a historical perspective, Summer's most influential song will forever be 'I Feel Love,' the Moroder-produced dance track that is a clarion call of techno and house music. It was a crossover smash with a thumpy, driving robo-beat with synth washes, odd echoey analog synthesizers, a sibilant high-hat repeating with the measures. On 'I Feel Love,' Summer expressed pure joy with a mantra so pure and pleasing that you wondered what the singer was on or who was doing what to her during the recording. She most certainly was feeling love.

'I Feel Love' created a blueprint: repetition that builds into a kind of relentlessness, a mantra that creates a kind of bliss, followed by a snap of silence -- a break, the quiet, slow reintroduction of a skeletal version of the beat -- followed by a grand return and more repetition. This construct remains central to electronic dance music, and when the song was expanded and released in 1983, it became early evidence of a move into the world of remixes. You can hear that template in the work of superstar producers such as Afrojack, David Guetta and Swedish House Mafia even today.

Summer and Moroder's method of music-making, in fact -- a producer and a diva teaming up to create dance-floor magic, designed not for live performance but to be jammed at massive volumes on sweaty dance floors -- is one that over four decades later still rules the charts.

It's in the DNA of Madonna's early work with John 'Jellybean' Benitez, Janet Jackson's work with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Britney Spears' collaborations with a range of different beat-makers, or Lady Gaga's close association with Swedish producer RedOne.

And though Summer later regretted the sexual nature of her early hits -- she eventually became a born-again Christian -- her influence on the sounds and spirit of the disco era and its aftermath can't be denied.

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-- Randall Roberts
Twitter: @liledit

Photo: Donna Summer performing in 1979. Credit: Los Angeles Times