Donna Summer: Bad Girls poll

i recently bought the Deluxe Edition edition of this album. also see that this has yet to be polled and it's summertime, perfect time for this poll.

We've done this, and the turnout was disgraceful.

really i could not find it, only found an album poll.

"Hot Stuff" still smokes -- one of the great hard-rock moments in a banner rock year. The ballads are still boring ("My Baby Understands" less so). On the electro side, "Our Love" and "Sunset People" are orange-tinged electric-blue melancholy that Shannon and New Order would spend a decade emulating.

Although this isn't a great album, Sumner-Bellote-Moroder are so confident -- have mastered their game so totally -- that they allow Sumner to write and sing a whole side of ballads. I'm so relieved when the disco tracks return that I'm ready to overrate them.

I love, love this album, but it's a blessing of modern technology that one can easily reshuffle the album order, since the extended ballads run does get a bit wearying. Still, I'm strongly considering voting for one the said ballads - "All Through the Night" - because no one else will and because I think it's beautifully sung by Summer.

*one of the said ballads*

i only know "bad girls" and "hot stuff" but they're both awesome. i really need to get this album.

"Dim All The Lights" and "Walk Away" were good singles too.

Even the ballads aren't boring by themselves, just boring in sequence -- like even the disco numbers, I guess.

when i did my research for this poll, to make sure ILM has not polled Bad Girls or On the Radio as of yet. i read a few Donna Summer threads, to my shock there really isn't a lot of talk about her. Bimble, RIP, was very vocal in her threads but ILM as a whole really doesn't have love for her?

so i'm hoping this thread takes off a little bit.

ILM has lots of love for her pre-Bad Girls work, which is just as spotty and probably more tedious cuz she was still besotted with fairies and princesses and such. Her singles stayed pretty consistent through the mid eighties. I'll defend The Wanderer as a real curio too.

I guess I'm ILM then, because I find most of her pre-Bad Girls albums much tighter, groovier and more rewarding than this one.

Obv Once Upon a Time is her masterpiece, but I like Four Seasons of Love and I Remember Yesterday best.

Oh yeah, this album. I vote "Walk Away."

IRY is the best of the earlier ones.

i remember getting The Wanderer as a little kid and was very disappointed in it. i like Air Supply better, lol.

xpost

So, apparently there was an era where Pat Ast could appear singing and dancing on network TV?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ_KbwEVBjU

should be liked because now days i don't like Air Supply at all.

With The Wanderer you have to get over the fact that it's Sumner's rawk record and accept it as rock in a particularly histrionic, arch kind of way ("Who Do You Think You're Foolin'," "Cold Love"). Unlike a lot of divas she can definitely sing rock, but the arrangements are sometimes deliberately hamfisted and locked-in. The best numbers are the ones on which she's allowed to bellow and moan over extended grooves as if it were still 1978: "Nightlife," "Running For Cover." Then there are the experiments that to my ears work. I can't believe she got her audience to accept the title track; and "Grand Illusion" is disco recorded at 45 rpm and played at 33.

The Wanderer reminds me of Bowie playing in a rock band circa Aladdin Sane: the record is inviting or alienating depending on your tolerance for the lead singer's discomfiture.

I still haven't heard The Wanderer, which is especially odd since I adore her aborted follow-up, I'm a Rainbow. Two songs from that album, "Melanie" and "People Talk," might be my favorite recordings by her.

Isn't "Romeo" from that period? I wish she'd recorded more Pointer Sisters-type electro-MOR.

This is pretty good too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhgKJXJrBE8

this isn't a great album

Wrong.

Voting "Hot Stuff."

I'm surprised you of all people are fine with the ballads.

Ditto.

As far as Donna ballads go, I prefer 'em like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztTjWGp2Fa0

(Forgiving her the Weird Al coif.)

xp Didn't say it was perfect; just said it was a great album. (And just like Once Upon A Time, its greatest stuff makes The Wanderer -- which I like just fine -- sound mundane in comparison. But we've had this argument before, a lot. I just couldn't not say it.)

Marcello Carlin says the eponymous '82 album is better than Thriller! But it's better than its reputation suggests ("Love is Just a Breath Away," "Protection," the two singles).

The Wanderer was Rolling Stone's #2 album of the year -- behind The River!

Dave Marsh loved it; it was his #2 behind Bruce, too (though I'm not sure if he would've had anything to do with RS by that point.) Didn't even make the Pazz & Jop Top 40, though, which is kind of fucked, especially a year after Bad Girls finished Top 10.

I wrote a review of Donna Summer with the thesis that it was Q dry-running the Thriller template.

Not necessarily a good thesis (or review), but yeah, that album holds up really really well. Even the dud tracks ("Livin' in America," overmodulated Billy Strayhorn) are solid.

i'm really leaning toward "Hot Stuff" but still have to listen to a few more songs off of this.

glad i gave myself some time on this. i think i have discovered one her best songs ever. i mean why wasn't i ever turned on to this song in the past.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uU9ikIg8FU

it's *astonishing* that more people don't know Our Love. or indeed that Blue Monday was royally ripped off from it.

the Disco Discharge compilation guys said recently they think that Walk Away is a classic, Justice used to start sets with Dim All The Lights, Simon Reynolds vouches for Sunset People in his Rip It Up.. discography. This album has many fans, each of whom like a different song best.

i was totally blown away by "Our Love" and it actually sounds like "Everything's Gone Green," maybe? other stand out were the singles and yeah "Walk Away" is pretty great as well. overall i like this album but didn't love it.

It's Temptation that "Our Love" has the most in common with, I think. Blue Monday admittedly has a genesis/influence in Klein & MBO's Dirty Talk, though Bobby O argued (even sued) that it derived from his sound, which he worked to the bone on about 1,000 records from the period. He was so convinced they ripped him off that he returned the favor by releasing Divine's Love Reaction, the first and most blatant Blue Monday rip-off. My favorite Blue Monday rip is the early Detroit Techno track Triangle of Love by Kreem.

What amazes me about Donna Summer is that despite having owned most of her records for many years, I never listened to them all and didn't know about Lucky until Horse Meat Disco re-edited it a year or three ago, and only a few weeks ago did I bother pulling out Once Upon a Time and discovering it's electronic disco in Now I Need You and Working the Midnight Shift. How these songs aren't hip proto-techno disco canon, I have no idea.

I love love love sunset people and it gets my vote because it's brilliant.

ditto

I'm pretty sure Peter Hook has said explicitly that they based the drum pattern of Blue Monday on this, but I didn't realise (having just heard it for the first time) that the synth rhythm from Temptation comes from it too. I love the fact that New Order were so blatant about trying to recreate the records they'd heard while clubbing in New York - no attempt to hide their sources.

Googling the deluxe edition, I found a strangely formal old review on Popmatters. Love the last line:

It harkens back to a time when songwriting and vocal ability were integral to modern popular music. Perhaps they will be again, someday.

http://www.popmatters.com/music/reviews/s/summersdonna-badgirlsdeluxe.shtml

What an odd thing to write.

I like the last, plaintive comma before someday. It's like a little sigh.

The deluxe edition of the album is bit of a rip off because the 2nd disc (aside from 1 measley extra track) had already come out before as 'The Dance Collection'.
Anyway both Bad Girls and The Dance Collection are on Spotify if anyone fancies checking them out.

Mancurians blatantly recreating New York clubbing records is excellent in the same way as Nigerians blantantly recreating New York clubbing records.

Forgot the killer lyric in "Walk Away": "Next time, there won't be no next time."

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

dim all the lights is such a seductive, lush song. it's near-perfect.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

"Journey to the Center of Your Heart" should have gotten a vote; and "My Baby Understands" is the weirdest of the ballads.

Man, people be loving side four.

Great showing for Our Love!

I was hoping this was going to be a poll of the lyrics to "Bad Girls"

Toot toot 23
Beep beep 1

Can someone address a lyrical issue I have with "Hot Stuff"?

Sittin' here eatin' my heart out waitin'
Waitin' for some lover to call
Dialed about a thousand numbers lately
Almost rang the phone off the wall

She's the one making the phone calls so it's not her phone that's ringing... ?

She dialed but no one picked up and she left messages on machines or with services and is waiting for someone to call back, like an after hours doctor, maybe.

But what phone is getting almost rung off the wall? She's dialing a thousand numbers, not the same number over and over again I assume.

Secretly she only wants her one real special crush to call back, Ravard, but unfortunately he is locked up in his studio and unreachable.
(xp)

Her own phone… oh wait, you are right. Sorry, burning out my fuse out here alone.

Maybe post here: Lyrical Logical Fallacies

If Ravard = Moroder that would be an interesting twist

Oh and it's her birthday, missing you LaDonna Gaines

Her and Paul Westerberg.

Remember Prince asking Paul Westerberg to "say hello to your sister," don't know if he ever met Donna Summer.

I’ve never understood that idiom “eat your heart out”

Westerberg also had a phone problem, but it was with an answering machine, iirc

I’ve never understood that idiom “eat your heart out”

It was basically the "How you like me now?" of the 1970s. Rare to see it used self-reflexively, as in "Hot Stuff."

Yeah, it feels very 70s to me (thx for clarifying)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKYVOubhqJY

Westerberg also had a phone problem, but it was with an answering machine, iirc

It was John Denver's birthday too, didn't he have a song about telephone troubles as well? Perhaps I am mixing him up with another aviation accident decedent.

Maybe Donna is using "ring" as a synonym for "call" like they do in the UK ("bloody 'ell, mate, did you ring the chemists?"). She lived in Germany for a long while, perhaps that where she picked up this idiom.

I like that angle. You could then ring your own phone off the wall. Although we wouldn't say we "called" our own phone off the wall; maybe we would say "dialed" our own phone off the wall, but "dialed" was already used in the verse.

The song was written by two Brits and a German, so hmm...

Thanks, Halfway there for you. I was trying to get to something like that last night, but Josefa was bewitched by Ravard and wasn't having it.

"My Baby Understands" finally got me.