FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Donna Summer - Bad Girls
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I have not included too many women…
in this feature recently, but I have been listening to Donna Summer’s Bad Girls and, on vinyl, it sounds terrific! Even if you are not a huge fan of Summer, I would suggest people grab the album, as it is remarkable and fresh. It was the seventh studio album from Donna Summer, and it was released on 25th April, 1979. I remember when its fortieth was marked last year – I will bring in a feature relating to that later -, and thinking whether we have seen an album like it since. Donna Summer, for sure, has inspired many other artists and was ahead of her time. The album was originally issued as a double album and it was Summer’s best-selling release of her career. The album received a deluxe and remastered edition in 2003 and, as I said, it still sounds new and cutting in 2020. It is a testament to the remarkable songwriting and durability of the album that it is being celebrated and people keep coming back to it. Upon its release, Bad Girls went to the top of the U.S. Billboard 200, and it stayed there for six weeks. With singles like Hot Stuff and Bad Girls owning the airwaves, it is no surprise the album was such a commercial success. It is one of the best albums of 1979, and it arrived at a time when Disco was sort of on its last legs; Summer showed there was plenty of life left, even though Punk was starting to muscle in and steal a lot of focus. Donna Summer was the first female artist to have two songs in the top-three of the Billboard Hot 100 – with the two singles I just mentioned.
In their review, this is what AllMusic wrote:
“Bad Girls marked the high-water mark in Donna Summer's career, spending six weeks at Number One, going double platinum, and spinning off four Top 40 singles, including the chart-topping title song and "Hot Stuff," which sold two million copies each, and the million-selling, Number Two hit "Dim All the Lights." Producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte recognized that disco was going in different directions by the late '70s, and they gave the leadoff one-two punch of "Hot Stuff" and "Bad Girls" a rock edge derived from new wave. The two-LP set was divided into four musically consistent sides, with the rocksteady beat of the first side giving way to a more traditional disco sound on the second side, followed by a third side of ballads, and a fourth side with a more electronic, synthesizer-driven sound that recalled Summer's 1977 hit "I Feel Love." Though remembered for its hits, the album had depth and consistency, concluding with "Sunset People," one of Summer's best album-only tracks. The result was the artistic and commercial peak of her career and, arguably, of disco itself”.
Maybe Bad Girls is the peak of Disco, but I think it is so much more than a pure Disco album. It has attitude and seduction; there is so much emotion and passion running through the blood, and the songs are never throwaway or too simplistic.
I want to bring in a review from Rolling Stone that was published in 1987. It is interesting comparing a review a decade after the album’s release and, in the case of AllMusic, quite a bit further down the line:
“In 1977, Donna Summer -- the first no-bullshit soul singer to have an icy, businesslike edge to her voice -- delivered "I Feel Love," one of the greatest, unalloyed disco songs ever. Two years later, Summer transcended her disco origins and stormed the old rock-pop traditions with Bad Girls. The album was more concise and scorching than Summer's earlier work -- particularly the title jam and the Rolling Stones-worthy "Hot Stuff." The general impression at the time was that Summer was assuming a place within the line of red-hot rock-soul belters, but the truth was much more important: Along with her brilliant producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, she was creating a new idea of international pop. Madonna's career without Summer and "Bad Girls"? Unthinkable.
Bad Girls is the first major album to use synthesizer-based disco studio techniques in the service of pop-rock songs. Much of it is played on live instruments; the guitar solo in "Hot Stuff" is as universal as, say, the Lindsey Buckingham riff on Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way." But on uncannily biting and hook-y tunes such as "Can't Get to Sleep at Night," Summer and Moroder showed how dance music could kick like the meanest real-time rock & roll. For years after, an entire commercial strain of rock and pop would obsess about technology in ways that would revolutionize the sound of music, for both good (Duran Duran) and ill (Kajagoogoo).
This reissue contains a companion disc that collects Summer's previous and subsequent hits: the minimalist masterwork "I Feel Love" and the sweet, soaring "On the Radio." Like Bad Girls itself, it's just about unimproveable”.
If you can get the album on vinyl, then do so. It sound so much bolder and more moving when you listen on vinyl and, aside from the obvious hits and highlights, there is a lot of treasure to be found. Last year the sensational, Bad Girls celebrated forty years and, as the feature below proves, it was a groundbreaking release. I know it will be poured over in 2029, when it has its fiftieth anniversary:
“Summer delivers every composition with precision and heart, her amorphic instrument reveling in its might on uptempo (“Journey to the Centre of Your Heart”) or downtempo (“On My Honor”) moments.
Musically, as with much of her canon up to this point, there had been other genres at work underneath or adjacent to the seductive disco element. One such genre—rock & roll—had long since been in Summer’s sights. Having recently been in a cooperative sphere with Brooklyn Dreams on her December 1978 smash “Heaven Knows,” Summer was sonically smitten with their rock-disco-soul vibe that merged with her own shimmering dance music shape on that effort.
Bad Girls strikingly split itself three ways with an aggressive, bottom-heavy rock-funk-disco fusion (“Dim All the Lights”), experimental electronics (“Our Love”) and booming AOR balladry (“All Through the Night”). That Summer could command these different sounds over an entire recording demonstrated that she couldn’t be confined to just one space.
It was the mark of a true pop pioneer.
Preceded by the aptly titled four-on-the-floor firestorm “Hot Stuff” in mid-April 1979, Bad Girls arrived later that month. It subsequently stormed the charts to become Summer’s best-selling collection and her second double album (of an eventual three) to top the U.S. Billboard 200. It’s a record set and held by Summer to this day.
In addition to its commercial triumph, its critical scores were near universal and culminated in a groundbreaking achievement with a Grammy nomination—and win—in 1980 for its lead-off single “Hot Stuff” for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. The newly minted category saw Summer as not only the first woman to win this accolade, but she was the only woman of color to compete in this category that year alongside Carly Simon, Rickie Lee Jones and Bonnie Raitt. She secured nominations again in 1982 and 1983, which put Summer at the head of an elite cache of black frontierswomen such as Joan Armatrading, Melba Moore, Nona Hendryx (of Labelle) and Tina Turner to receive entry into an exclusively white field”.
I am going to listen to Bad Girls again this week, as I really miss artists like Donna Summer, and I feel the music scene could do with a new explosion of Disco and Soul. We have some uplifting and spirited music now, but nothing that resembles Donna Summer’s 1979-released gem. It is a brilliant album that will continue to stun and amaze for years and years to come. If you have not heard this cracker, then make sure you investigate Bad Girls…