Disco is Dead, Long Live Disco: R.I.P. Donna Summer and Robin Gibb

The Rock Turtleneck office disco ball is flying at half mast today in the wake of this weekend's deaths of Donna Summer and Robin Gibb. Both were in their early 60s and both died of cancer.

Summer and Gibb's band the Bee Gees were probably the two biggest acts of the disco era. Though I'm not sure either one of them thought of themselves as disco artists. Like most musicians, they were just trying to make the best sounding records they could.

"We never heard the word disco," Robin Gibb (left in photo) is quoted as saying in his New York Times obituary published today. "We just wrote groove songs we could harmonize strongly to, and with great melodies. The fact that you could dance to them, we never thought about."

But people did dance to them, they danced the world over, they danced all night, and they danced very well indeed. And they should be dancing. Take this guy on the left for example - hey, isn't he the one who asked me to go "off the menu" at the massage parlor last weekend?

In terms of great-sounding records, Summer's big 1977 hit "I Feel Love" is one of the greatest ever.

Produced by German uberproducer Giorgio Moroder, who met the Boston-raised Summer when she was living abroad, the tune came out in 1977 sounding like it had been sent from the future.

With Summer cooing over a hyper-robotic synthesizer bed, It's one of the coolest sounding juxtaposition of woman and machine, a track that can be enjoyed in the middle of the afternoon on your iPod, with a nightclub nary in sight. (I strongly recommend the eight-minute 12" version, linked below.)



R.I.P. Robin and Donna. The dance floor in heaven just got a little more crowded.

Buy on iTunes:
Bee Gees:  Saturday Night Fever
Donna Summer: "I Feel Love" (12" Version)