Dance Music Classic CD: Donna Summer "Bad Girls"

In spring 1979, it was so easy to tag Donna Summer: her upcoming album "Bad Girls" (CDMP3) was bound to be sexy, pulsating, naughty, beat driven hot - everything you'd want from a dance music record. But, as with every other truism, the real life details do this artist a little more justice.

With five essential albums released in just the two years following her 1975 breathrough, Summer was the biggest star ever launched from the club underground. Her first worldwide hit "Love to Love You Baby" sparked countless fantasies and the precedent-shattering mid-1977 release "I Feel Love" was applauded universally as a tecnological and musical breakthrough.

The following year, two crucial pop songs rocketed Donna Summer directly into the mainstream. "Last Dance," written for Summer's supporting role in the film Thank God It's Friday, hit the Top 5 in late Spring. The magnificent elaboration of Jimmy Web's cantata "MacArthur Park" followed, being Summer's first Number One single in the Fall, driving Live and More, Summer's first Number One album. And, by then, her trademark wasn't a wispy coo, but a voice of knockout power, gem-like clarity, and laser-like pitch.

In fact, after this three year run, this artist was just about to score her biggest hits yet. And Summer was doing plenty of the heavy lifting herself, right alongside her celebrated producers and writing partners, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte. The busiest cowriter on Bad Girls is Donna herself, with five co-writes and three songs solely written by her.

The entirety of Bad Girls sets a standard of consistency that has rarely been matched since, and it's diversity underscores Summer's undeniable influence on every young div-ette who followed, whether from R&B, pop, country or dance. "Dim All the Lights" and "On My Honor" both have country elements that foreshadow Summer's later settling in Nashville. And just as much as "Journey to the Center of Your Heart" and "All Through the Night" feel like the singles that the label never got to, Bad Girls' electronic medley - "Our Love", "Lucky" and "Sunset People" - could have easily have anchored a second album itself.

It was apparent, the week of Bad Girls release that it was one of the great dance music CDs of all time - a perfect play. And in retrospect, it is definitive in it's production style, it's vision of a truly global dance music, and it's kaleidoscopic expression of a woman's outspoken, daring, emotional and observant sides. What was the savviest, most apt reflection of 1979 continues to be an essential expression of the present time, and the forseeable future.

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