Donna Summer
Love To Love You Baby

Essential History of Electronic Music

VII. Decline and Fall of the Fourth Reich

Following the definitive Potsdam Conference concluded on August 2, 1945, the cannibalization of the German State was effectively instituted by the victorious powers in the second world conflict. Germany paid the price of its bloodshed without any reduction in sentence through the loss of political and territorial identity: the Colossus of Rhodes, raised by a furious popular sentiment, had crumbled under the fierce blows of an institutional army, first materializing in partisan guerrilla warfare, then in the negotiated partitioning of ancestral assets. Can the entire world expect the phoenix to rise gilded by the sun from the ashes into which it willingly died? Miraculously, Germany will become the chameleonic interpreter of the new course, proving itself a proud and stubborn empiricist. The mindset it will refer to will be prepared in becoming, open to the most disparate evolutions in the artistic, scientific, musical fields: from the union of science and music, Karlheinz Stockhausen, primus inter pares, will debut as the deus ex machina of the entire electronic opera, laying the foundations of that Kosmische Musik in which Kraftwerk will render the experimental opus at the mercy of the dance hall.

If the heralds of the Autobahn were certainly the theoretical link between intellectual circles and the dancefloor, the mere exercise of using the synthesizer for the dancefloor belonged to the vulgar genius of Giorgio Moroder. Born in the peaceful town of Ortisei in 1940, he was an Italian talent before being a German interpreter, quickly attracted by the artificial sensations of newborn electronic synthesizer models. Giorgio Moroder was probably the real father of dance electronic music, the first to establish the modus vivendi of the nightclub, defining those musical style marks that, for better or worse, would remain etched in the dance tradition. Giorgio's substantial fortune was meeting the vocal talent of Donna Summer, the muse who would make the cold and still unfamiliar synth sequences accessible to the seventies audience. In the curious scenario of a München, daughter of a risen Germany, the unperturbed aplomb of Moroder and the fiery and black star of Donna Summer met by fate. With a background as a choir singer in her native Boston church, it is at this occasion that the talented American would realize her imminent future as the "Queen of Disco". Riding the curiosity sparked by the impending Kraftwerk phenomenon, Moroder and Summer began a collaboration whose first outcome was the composed and pleasant "Lady of The Night," dated 1974, impregnated with electroacoustic sounds and soul vocalizations. It was the forerunner of a career that would increasingly impose itself in the dance hall through a progressive deconstruction of the traditional song format. It was 1975 when Moroder decided to change the game, effectively instituting the decisive breakthrough in electronic music: convinced by the not insignificant success of "Lady of The Night," the German showman persuaded Donna Summer to stage a simulation of an orgasm for a total of seventeen minutes on an electronic base; the result was a single named "Love to Love You Baby," a kaleidoscopic embroidery where the American singer strings together whispers, moans, and gasps of pleasure. America welcomed with a plebiscitary tribute the new course of electronic music created by Moroder and Summer, consecrating their talent with second place in the 1976 Billboard chart. Disco music was born.

It is no coincidence that it was precisely the new continent that absorbed the new dancefloor music phenomenon like a sea sponge: European tradition was far from assimilating such an innovative musical product, while America was too varied a melting pot not to welcome a new social phenomenon with open arms. The key element lies right there, in the meeting of Moroder and Summer, in the ideal passing of the baton from European tradition to American culture, in the official handing over of the keys to electronic music to the new continent. Proud Germany would fade there, in the last experimental works of an ever more dance-oriented Moroder ("From Here To Eternity" would consecrate him to the empyrean of great dance music interpreters), akin to those Kraftwerk—a simultaneous acme and decline of the KlingKlang, now light-years distant from the Teutonic spirit of Kosmische Musik. Donna Summer would continue her work as an interpreter of dance music, confirming her primacy as the queen of the disco in America and spreading the new musical dogma across the rest of Europe. The spirit of Germany's 1968 communes, cosmic heralds, and psychedelic journeys has extinguished, giving way to new genre contaminations. A few thousand kilometers separate it from the place where a new controversial musical revolution is underway...

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