‘No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)’ by Donna Summer & Barbra Streisand is my new jam.
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‘Try Me I Know We Can Make It’ by Donna Summer is my new jam.
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Pep yourself up with this Hi-NRG mix, which is CHOCK FULL OF DANCING SCHOOL JAMS. Track listing here.
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Oh God this summer is going to suck isn’t it. I love this song but JESUS I AM WAY TOO SWEATY ALREADY.
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More than a disco queen, Summer was a deity we could call our own, a Boston native who recorded with Italians, married a Brooklyn paesano and fronted a group called Brooklyn Dreams. With that powerful, breathy-to-guttural-to-rafter-shaking mezzo-soprano, she recorded music of both florid grandeur and hard precision, the very essence of urban life in the 1970s.
She was, in short, an honorary New Yorker. Which I imagine is how hundreds of born-and-bred New Yorkers unconsciously regard the news today of her untimely death at age 63 from (reportedly) lung cancer. Regardless of where her upbringing and musical training had taken her—a childhood and adolescence singing in churches in Dorchester, salad days in Germany in the musical Hair before she met her Berlin-based studio collaborator Giorgio Moroder—Donna, to the end, belonged to all of us: outerborough ethnics; Manhattan velvet-rope aesthetes (and those who pretended); the gay, black and Latino communities.
Of course, if you’re reading this in Detroit or Las Vegas or Minneapolis or Atlanta or Los Angeles or London, Donna spoke to you, too. Considering her lifelong association with a communal, hedonistic pop-culture moment, it’s remarkable when one plays back her oeuvre how intimate, almost solitary her great works really were. Call her the Wanderer, for her ability to stretch, adapt and transmogrify dance music until it embraced everyone and everything.
— Chris Molanphy pays tribute to the great Donna Summer, who passed away today. (via sotc-nyc)
