Exclusively Donna Summer: The Song Giorgio Moroder Called "The Birth of Electronic Dance Music"
"Exclusively Donna Summer" runs the catalog of one of the most important — and most quietly influential — voices in pop history on Kalisha's Exclusive collection.
She was born LaDonna Adrian Gaines in Boston in 1948, singing in church before she ever sang for money. Her break came in an unlikely place: cast in a European production of the musical Hair, she moved to Munich, Germany, and there met the Italian producer Giorgio Moroder and his songwriting partner Pete Bellotte. In 1975, the three of them released "Love to Love You Baby," a seventeen-minute single built almost entirely around Summer's breathy, moaning vocal performance — genuinely scandalous for the time, and enough to make her a star on its own.
It's what came two years later that actually changed music. "I Feel Love" (1977) replaced live instrumentation almost entirely with a Moog synthesizer pulse — no band, just Summer's voice over a machine. Moroder himself would later call it "the birth of electronic dance music," and he wasn't exaggerating for effect: the entire lineage of house, techno, and modern EDM runs back through that one track. Brian Eno reportedly told David Bowie the song would "change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years." He undersold it.
The hits that followed — "Hot Stuff," "Bad Girls," "MacArthur Park," "Last Dance," "On the Radio" — made her the undisputed Queen of Disco, and the numbers back up the title: five Grammy Awards, the first artist in history to have three consecutive double albums hit No. 1, over 130 million records sold worldwide.
She died in 2012, of lung cancer, having never smoked a cigarette in her life. Summer herself believed the cause traced back to September 11, 2001 — her apartment at the time sat close enough to the World Trade Center that she'd spent weeks breathing the air and dust in its aftermath.
None of that complicated ending is what plays on this station. What plays is the catalog that came before it — the sound of one voice and one drum machine quietly inventing the next fifty years of dance music.
🎧 You can listen to Exclusively Donna Summer right inside Telegram — no app, no browser — through our Kalisha Radio Mini App.
— Kalisha 🎧
Enjoyed this? The app is free to start.
Get the app