Of course, I should be writing this from my holiday home up on Mars. Or not even writing it - I should be beaming the words directly onto the screen via a jack plug in the back of my neck. Whilst wearing a hover pack. This is the sort of future that was promised to me when I was a kid in all the magazines and comics I read anyway, a brave new world of talking robot slaves and intergalactic travel. Never happened did it?
Saying that, compared to 1977, the future did arrive in the form of technological developments that would have been beyond my wildest dreams in 1977. Like having a device in my pocket that could store and play over 500 albums on the go or that my half baked writings could be published on a global scale and be read by people in Australia minutes after I'd written them. Incredible developments to be sure, and ones that should not be dismissed just because of their now commonplace ubiquity. But for the most part it remains the depressing familiarity of the same old. I still get up and put my pants on every day anyway. Ain't no machine doing that for me just yet.
In 1977, Donna Summer released 'I Remember Yesterday'. A concept album of sorts, side one was a set of tunes united by a musical theme that looked to the past whilst the music of side two looked to tomorrow. The closing song, 'I Feel Love', was written with Giorgio Moroder and presented as a vision of the kind of music we would all be listening to in the future. On Mars whilst dancing in mid air wearing hover packs I suppose. Never happened though, did it?
Well, did it? Does the music of the today sound like 'I Feel Love'? Of a sort it does, though perhaps only in the way that those 1950, 60's and 70s sci-fi mags and films I used to love occasionally struck lucky with an approximate vision of how some aspects of modern life turned out by getting parts of it right. I can remember watching '2001: A Space Odyssey' in 1982 and being amazed at the thought of Dr Floyd making a televisual call to his family back home on earth. 'Can't happen here' I thought. And most of it hasn't; we aren't sending manned flights to Jupiter or commercial flights into space just yet, but I can make a similar televisual call from that device in my pocket that holds all those albums.
So part of my promised future has arrived, and in the same way you can hear a lot of 'I Feel Love' in 70's disco, 80's/90's dance/trance and, let's be honest, virtually every band since that ever plugged in a keyboard from new romantics to hardcore Industrial and all stops in-between. Yes, the ideas presented on 'I Feel Love' have been plundered by all and sundry, but only in the same way that Moroder himself plundered (for example) James Brown's more primal beats to create it. Because 'I Feel Love' didn't arrive fully formed like Venus from her shell and in that sense it's as much a stepping stone, a passing of the baton as between (for another example) Buddy Holly to The Beatles to most bands that followed, but I'd suggest that 'I Feel Love' in its entirety still pretty much stands alone and aloof with it's cool, mood generating aura.
'I Feel Love' sounded like nothing else around it in the charts at the time. Viewed in its 1977 setting then it may as well have flown down from Mars on a hover pack. Ziggy Stardust and his band purported to have hailed from the same planet, but they still sounded like they'd paid their dues on the pub rock circuit whereas Summer's song barely sounded touched by the hand of man. To take the most obvious, bluntest frying pan in the face contemporary comparison, then I've no doubt that Kraftwerk could have come up with the music to 'I Feel Love' without breaking much of a sweat. What they couldn't have done, and not done in a million years, is provide the vocal. On the other hand, Summer couldn't have sung something like 'The Model' without it sounding a fiasco, a burlesque robot party from a very bad sci-fi B movie and it's the sum of the parts, of Moroder's music and Summer's vocal that makes 'I Feel Love' so incredibly unique.
For a long while, I only ever listened to 'I Feel Love' in the form of Patrick Cowley's fifteen minute remix. And that's because I could/can listen to the song all day and I always found that the original was over all too soon (which gives you a hint as to the direction this review is going). But listening to the 1977 single again tonight, I can see that no remix was ever needed, and neither does the song need lengthening; it's like comparing the original 1977 cut of Star Wars with the CGI retooled 1997 version. Both have the 'gee whiz' factor of the shiny new parts, but both manage to lose sight of the ground that was broken by the original articles, and what they gain in gloss they lose in heart.
As I say above, 'I Feel Love' is a logical progression in popular music of sorts. If you take Chuck Berry's "it's got a backbeat, you can't lose it" description of rock & roll as gospel (and I do), then Moroder's electronic chassis strips the concept down to the bare bones - or more accurately, bare wires - of that backbeat. A few repeated words and a repetitive electronic beat and that's all it is - 'I Feel Love' is actually a non song in any traditional sense, but just as 'all' hypnotism is is a few calm words and a swinging watch, the combined effect is a mesmeric swirl of self contained bliss.
Moroder's music throbs like an excited pulse, all flashing twitches of firing synapses. The ever rolling heartbeat thump is nothing less that a re-imagining of the primal rhythms and desires of the blues cooked on a flame set to a slow, low burn that's there to heat Ms Summer up to boiling point. If her vocal on the previous 'Love To Love You Baby' got the puritans in a lather with its erotic overtones, then 'I Feel Love' should have blown all kinds of moral fuses because throughout its duration, Summer sounds like she's in the throes of a slow building orgasm in the midst of the swirling electronica. What lyrics there are are delivered more to herself with a complete lack of self consciousness that anybody else is listening: "Ooh it's so good, it's so good, it's so goooooooood" before the ultimate release of the repeated title with "looooovveeee' stretched out in eyes closed, arms aloft ecstasy.
So the sound of the future then? Well yes in part - the electronics may now sound a bit valve powered and running on old money, but the sensuous mix of sex and machine (that's not machine fetishism like, say, the auto erotica of Ballard's 'Crash') is a one off. Countless acts have revamped, re-mixed, re-moulded and retooled the original - sometimes cleverly, sometimes lazily - until the concept has been stretched and twisted in every way imaginable so that its influence has entered popular consciousness to the point it's no longer noticed or acknowledged. The aftershocks are everywhere, but on it's own terms 'I Feel Love' remains defiantly different, the sound of a future that has not yet arrived. A magnificent milestone in popular music.
Saying that, compared to 1977, the future did arrive in the form of technological developments that would have been beyond my wildest dreams in 1977. Like having a device in my pocket that could store and play over 500 albums on the go or that my half baked writings could be published on a global scale and be read by people in Australia minutes after I'd written them. Incredible developments to be sure, and ones that should not be dismissed just because of their now commonplace ubiquity. But for the most part it remains the depressing familiarity of the same old. I still get up and put my pants on every day anyway. Ain't no machine doing that for me just yet.
In 1977, Donna Summer released 'I Remember Yesterday'. A concept album of sorts, side one was a set of tunes united by a musical theme that looked to the past whilst the music of side two looked to tomorrow. The closing song, 'I Feel Love', was written with Giorgio Moroder and presented as a vision of the kind of music we would all be listening to in the future. On Mars whilst dancing in mid air wearing hover packs I suppose. Never happened though, did it?
Well, did it? Does the music of the today sound like 'I Feel Love'? Of a sort it does, though perhaps only in the way that those 1950, 60's and 70s sci-fi mags and films I used to love occasionally struck lucky with an approximate vision of how some aspects of modern life turned out by getting parts of it right. I can remember watching '2001: A Space Odyssey' in 1982 and being amazed at the thought of Dr Floyd making a televisual call to his family back home on earth. 'Can't happen here' I thought. And most of it hasn't; we aren't sending manned flights to Jupiter or commercial flights into space just yet, but I can make a similar televisual call from that device in my pocket that holds all those albums.
So part of my promised future has arrived, and in the same way you can hear a lot of 'I Feel Love' in 70's disco, 80's/90's dance/trance and, let's be honest, virtually every band since that ever plugged in a keyboard from new romantics to hardcore Industrial and all stops in-between. Yes, the ideas presented on 'I Feel Love' have been plundered by all and sundry, but only in the same way that Moroder himself plundered (for example) James Brown's more primal beats to create it. Because 'I Feel Love' didn't arrive fully formed like Venus from her shell and in that sense it's as much a stepping stone, a passing of the baton as between (for another example) Buddy Holly to The Beatles to most bands that followed, but I'd suggest that 'I Feel Love' in its entirety still pretty much stands alone and aloof with it's cool, mood generating aura.
'I Feel Love' sounded like nothing else around it in the charts at the time. Viewed in its 1977 setting then it may as well have flown down from Mars on a hover pack. Ziggy Stardust and his band purported to have hailed from the same planet, but they still sounded like they'd paid their dues on the pub rock circuit whereas Summer's song barely sounded touched by the hand of man. To take the most obvious, bluntest frying pan in the face contemporary comparison, then I've no doubt that Kraftwerk could have come up with the music to 'I Feel Love' without breaking much of a sweat. What they couldn't have done, and not done in a million years, is provide the vocal. On the other hand, Summer couldn't have sung something like 'The Model' without it sounding a fiasco, a burlesque robot party from a very bad sci-fi B movie and it's the sum of the parts, of Moroder's music and Summer's vocal that makes 'I Feel Love' so incredibly unique.
For a long while, I only ever listened to 'I Feel Love' in the form of Patrick Cowley's fifteen minute remix. And that's because I could/can listen to the song all day and I always found that the original was over all too soon (which gives you a hint as to the direction this review is going). But listening to the 1977 single again tonight, I can see that no remix was ever needed, and neither does the song need lengthening; it's like comparing the original 1977 cut of Star Wars with the CGI retooled 1997 version. Both have the 'gee whiz' factor of the shiny new parts, but both manage to lose sight of the ground that was broken by the original articles, and what they gain in gloss they lose in heart.
As I say above, 'I Feel Love' is a logical progression in popular music of sorts. If you take Chuck Berry's "it's got a backbeat, you can't lose it" description of rock & roll as gospel (and I do), then Moroder's electronic chassis strips the concept down to the bare bones - or more accurately, bare wires - of that backbeat. A few repeated words and a repetitive electronic beat and that's all it is - 'I Feel Love' is actually a non song in any traditional sense, but just as 'all' hypnotism is is a few calm words and a swinging watch, the combined effect is a mesmeric swirl of self contained bliss.
Moroder's music throbs like an excited pulse, all flashing twitches of firing synapses. The ever rolling heartbeat thump is nothing less that a re-imagining of the primal rhythms and desires of the blues cooked on a flame set to a slow, low burn that's there to heat Ms Summer up to boiling point. If her vocal on the previous 'Love To Love You Baby' got the puritans in a lather with its erotic overtones, then 'I Feel Love' should have blown all kinds of moral fuses because throughout its duration, Summer sounds like she's in the throes of a slow building orgasm in the midst of the swirling electronica. What lyrics there are are delivered more to herself with a complete lack of self consciousness that anybody else is listening: "Ooh it's so good, it's so good, it's so goooooooood" before the ultimate release of the repeated title with "looooovveeee' stretched out in eyes closed, arms aloft ecstasy.
So the sound of the future then? Well yes in part - the electronics may now sound a bit valve powered and running on old money, but the sensuous mix of sex and machine (that's not machine fetishism like, say, the auto erotica of Ballard's 'Crash') is a one off. Countless acts have revamped, re-mixed, re-moulded and retooled the original - sometimes cleverly, sometimes lazily - until the concept has been stretched and twisted in every way imaginable so that its influence has entered popular consciousness to the point it's no longer noticed or acknowledged. The aftershocks are everywhere, but on it's own terms 'I Feel Love' remains defiantly different, the sound of a future that has not yet arrived. A magnificent milestone in popular music.
I know this will sound odd and I should probably be shot at dawn for saying it, but this seemed curiously retro when I first heard it... it reminded me of the original late '60s version of "Popcorn" and the Serge Gainsbourg/Jane Birkin '60s classic "Je t'aime... moi non plus". I cannot escape the associations to this day.
ReplyDeleteI've been listening to this a lot since her death last week and it never fails to inspire. I don't think 'I Feel Love' fell out of a clear blue sky, and I absolutely take the 'Popcorn' comparison, but in comparison it's harsh and calculating. Moroder makes his synths throb with a sensuality not heard before and rarely since, but the clincher (for me) is the almost supernatural way Summer's voice weaves its way 'round the beats - not so much a ghost in the machine as a ghost that's PART of the machine.
DeleteThanks for reading.