An ode to Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love'

Where do you start to give the most important song in dance music history its due respect? Do I start with Donna Summer’s effortlessly beautiful vocals? Do I wax lyrical about Giorgio Moroder’s unique vision? Should it be that it sounded like the future in 1977 and is still timeless in 2017?

From your conservative aunt’s wedding to a Dalston basement at 4am, ‘I Feel Love’ has never gone out of fashion. It breathes rarefied air atop the electronic dance music mountain of classic tracks, paving the way for everything from ‘Blue Monday’ to ‘Your Love’. It might not be the best-ever disco track and it probably isn’t the best track to be made up of predominantly electronic elements, but it brought the idea of music with a mechanic heart to the world’s attention. By swapping sumptuous orchestral arrangements for hard-edged, computer-programmed efficiency, Moroder and fellow producer Pete Bellotte took the futurism of Kraftwerk and made it danceable. The 4/4 thud, the repetitive building of tension to ecstatic release, the tightly sequenced bassline, the layered arrangement and multiple mixes gave dance music a new blueprint.

In 1977, disco was ramping up to its nadir of glitz, glam, cocaine and indulgence with the genre almost been fully yanked from the gay underground into the international domain. One of Moroder and Summer’s earlier collaborations ‘Love To Love You Baby’ was partly to blame/thank for this. Not to say that the track was the kind of commercially targeted drivel getting churned out post-Saturday Night Fever. The original is 17-minutes long and has 23 fake orgasms (according to Time magazine) in it after all. But, if Moroder had already proven himself a hit-maker with that song, what he did with ‘I Feel Love’ may as well have made him an alien from outer space.

In fact, it even feels like the soundtrack to an extra-terrestrial visit. That shimmering, droning synth is the first sighting. The landing emphasised by the thump of a pulsing bassline and unrelenting disco beat. Finally the dreamy vocal floats out of this metaphorical craft and in a blaze of white light the door drops down. Standing in the mist is the disco queen Donna Summer herself, her multi-tracked vocals sexual yet romantic, fun yet poignant and conveying a level of emotion you didn’t think was possible with just 17 words.

When I was a 12-year-old in the grips of a Blink 182 addiction, Danny Howell's remix was the first version I heard of 'I Feel Love'. It sticks close to the original material and the chords, progression and ecstatic releases of Summer’s descending ‘loooove’ all piqued my interest immediately. But in that context it felt a bit hokey. As if, yeah ok, it must be an old track if it's getting remixed for the present day.

A few years later, when a friend and I were listening to records we'd bought that day, he put on 'I Feel Love'. I knew it was an important song but I'd never really given it the time of day because of that remix. When it hit the platter, the nuances in the bassline and the warm drive of the kick drum really hit me. This couldn't be brought into the present day by a remix. The original created the fucking future.

Louis Anderson-Rich is Mixmag's Digital Intern and you can find him fallin' free on Twitter.