RIP Donna Summer
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Normally I don’t feel the requirement to comment upon the passing away of someone I have never met, Amy Winehouse being the sole exception that I can recall. Nothing wrong with doing so but I try to keep status updates and blogs upbeat and positive and I don’t find it so easy to do so in the context of death.
I will at least endeavour to spell Donna Summer’s name correctly in the title, as I just realised I misspelled Amy Winehouse as Whinehouse, a Freudian slip perhaps, and a strange person perhaps for me to comment upon given that her music wasn’t really my cup of tea but her life was lived out in public and it was hard not to want to understand and feel for her.
It perhaps seems really clichéd but Donna Summer really did change music. OK, the track that for me really made her name, I Feel Love (forgive me for inaccuracies, as I was born after it was released) was produced by the equally amazing and game-changing Giorgio Moroder, but it required someone to front it and a particular someone.
Imagine Tina Turner singing “I Feel Love”?
No, don’t even go there.
So a big thank you to someone who changed music, and who’s very positive, love-filled music which is incredibly future-thinking has changed the world so much for the better, in my eyes. And ears.
Everyone else will put a video up of her track or disco days, etc, so I instead will put a video of how she is still so influential in the house music world that I so love – this is Ricardo Villalobos really testing the crowd’s patience at Cocoon In The Park 2011 with clunk-click music and it takes a while for everyone to realise that he is mixing “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer under it, and I think the video shows how her warmth and love in the music totally changes the vibe of the crowd.
I Feel Love.