It just keeps going. For nearly 17 minutes, through verse, through chorus, through decomposition and synthesis, through one climax after another, through (it was questionably tallied at the time of its release) some 22 simulated orgasms on the part of its lead singer, “Love to Love You Baby,” Donna Summer's 1975 induction into American pop culture, just keeps going.
Summer, who died on May 17, would soon after be crowned the “Queen of Disco,” and eulogies have tended to remember her voice and her attitude as evocative of that brief, faddish era. But the song that introduced her to the American market—“Love to Love You Baby”—did more than launch a fad, or a star. It helped changed pop music's DNA. The verisimilitude of Summer's gasps and moans might have fed the song's notoriety, but it was its length—the extended set of variations that Summer and producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte fashioned at the behest of executive Neil Bogart—that proved its most disruptive contribution, a counterargument to the riff-oriented thrust of rock dominance. “Love to Love You Baby” played long enough for everything to change.
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