#summer: the donna summer musical

[70sgroovy]

donna summer photographed by fin costello, 1976

[twixnmix]

Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand photographed by Francesco Scavullo for their duet “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)” in 1979.

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Donna Summer (1981)

[music-tourney]

[summer-s0ul]

Donna Summer as Marilyn Monroe, 1976

[vintagebaby]

donna summer photographed by chris walter, 1976.

[vintage-tigre]

Donna Summer photographed by Francesco Scavullo in 1978

[tha-wrecka-stow]

[desertangels70s]

[itsbarbiebiiittchhhhh]

Donna Summer.

[twixnmix]

Donna Summer photographed by Jack Mitchell, 1978.

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Donna Summer (1980)

[music-tourney]

[vintage-tigre]

Donna Summer, 1979

Photographed by Harry Langston

[lesbiofthevalley]

donna ✰

[cleolinda]

When I was a child in the '80s, I absorbed some kind of cultural truism that disco was ridiculous, embarrassing, cheesy, a cultural relic to be mocked at every turn. Remember, I'm under ten years old at this time, and I still manage to get this impression. There was another, milder sea change when grunge overtook the hair metal of the late '80s, so I never questioned the idea that disco should be dead and buried. We like silly things, I thought in my 13-year-old wisdom, and then we get over it.

Then I saw The Last Days of Disco (1998) while I was in college, and suddenly I realized that disco was fun, and it was like—it was in the roots of—music I already loved. And the end of that movie also—hints? tells you? I can't remember how explicitly—that disco didn't just fade like most trends; it was killed off.

I watched a lot of VH1 in those days, the late '90s, with a little TV sitting on my tall university-issue dresser, its corner overlooking my computer desk while I struggled with piles of assignments. This was the heyday of Behind the Music, so it was great background TV. And then one day (1999) they ran a Donna Summer—the "Queen of Disco"—concert special. The video up there is the song that immediately became my favorite of hers. It’s just instant serotonin to me, any version of it. I bought the whole VH1 album on CD, and "This Time I Know It's For Real" may genuinely be one of my all-time favorite songs, now, still, more than 20 years later. You can hear the original version (1989) here (the backing instrumental that I just found today is lovely), but the live version ten years later, the video up there, has a really special comeback—joyous, gracious survival—energy to it.

Watching the whole concert, I got it. Why the fuck did I ever think disco wasn't amazing? It was always the kind of thing I loved; we had all just been pretending that it was embarrassing glitter trash.

And then I found out why we were pretending. From densely-footnoted Wikipedia:

Disco Demolition Night was a Major League Baseball (MLB) promotion on Thursday, July 12, 1979, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois, that ended in a riot. At the climax of the event, a crate filled with disco records was blown up on the field between games of the twi-night doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. Many had come to see the explosion rather than the games and rushed onto the field after the detonation. The playing field was so damaged by the explosion and by the rioters that the White Sox were required to forfeit the second game to the Tigers. [...] The popularity of disco declined significantly in late 1979 and 1980. Many disco artists carried on, but record companies began labeling their recordings as dance music. [...] Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh described Disco Demolition Night as "your most paranoid fantasy about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately lead". Marsh was one who, at the time, deemed the event an expression of bigotry, writing in a year-end 1979 feature that "white males, eighteen to thirty-four are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they're the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist, but broadcasting has never been an especially civil-libertarian medium." Nile Rodgers, producer and guitarist for the disco-era band Chic,

(who survived the disco era to make half the music I loved in the '80s)

likened the event to Nazi book burning. Gloria Gaynor, who had a huge disco hit with "I Will Survive," stated, "I've always believed it was an economic decision—an idea created by someone whose economic bottom line was being adversely affected by the popularity of disco music. So they got a mob mentality going."

The DJ who ran the whole thing, Steve Dahl, complains that it was VH1 itself—you know, those Behind the Music specials I was watching—circa 1996 that labeled the whole debacle as bigotry when it so totally was not, you guys, and he is so tired of defending himself. But I'm gonna tell you, Steve, I don't really care. Maybe Disco Demolition Night was your fault; maybe you were just a part of something so much bigger and uglier that you couldn't see the whole size of it. Can you draw a direct line from the weird bigoted vitriol directed at those dance records to Ronald Reagan, elected the very next year, not giving a single fuck about the AIDS crisis? You probably don't want to, but I will.

And I don't care because I can look around the U.S. right now and tell you, nearly 45 years later, people are trying to demolish a lot more than disco. The Club Q shooter was sentenced to life in prison just a few hours ago. It's Pride Month, and we're all sitting here holding our breaths. That's a terrible way to end a post about a beautiful happy song I love, I guess, unless you turn it around and say, that should have been the whole point of this post in the first place. Listen to this song and think, people wanted to destroy this music, this sound, this joy for some reason. They want to stop people from just living their lives, from dancing. And yet, disco is still here. It was there in 1979, and it was there when Donna Summer released this song in 1989, and it was there when she returned in 1999. The Queen of Disco passed away in 2012, and it's still here. I feel a lot of joy when I listen to this song, but I don't think I'd ever thought about it being the joy of grooving with something just because it’s beautiful, the joy of just being here, still.