I Feel Love: An Exploration of Love and Disco

‘I Want Your Love’, ‘Visions of Love’, ‘I Feel Love’ – if there’s a running theme in disco music it’s without a doubt, love. To celebrate the release of our upfront collection Love Jams Vol. 2 (with some exclusive new edits), we explored why love and disco share such common ground.

From the sadder side of losing your lover like in ‘The Love I Lost’ by Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes to celebrating the absolute joy of being consumed by love displayed in Sylvester’s – ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), love and disco are proudly intertwined with a fierce passion. 

As discussed in our previous article, NYC Days of Disco, disco spawned a club scene that provided a safe space for what was considered a forbidden love at the time to be displayed and celebrated. This created a cycle of passion on the dance floor feeding into the content of the music. 

It’s no secret that in clubs where alcohol was prohibited and dancing from dusk till dawn was a must, the crowd were partial to the use of amphetamines to aid them throughout the night. From our internet research, we have found out that a few of the negative side effects of amphetamines include but are not limited to; an increase in confidence, heightened libido and an attraction to strangers whom the user would usually not look twice at. One can only assume that this had a part to play in the content of the songs. 

If there was any star who could be defined as the symbol of love in disco it was ‘The First Lady of Love’, Donna Summer. Summer was working as a model and backing singer in Munich where she met the legendary producer Giorgio Moroder, which led to their collaboration on which is arguably her second most famous song, ‘Love to Love You Baby’. The slow and seductive jam was released in the USA via Casablanca records where it was so well received by attendees of Casablanca President Neil Bogart’s industry parties they requested that he play the record over and over, which led to him requesting Summer and Moroder create a longer version of the song resulting in a steamy seventeen minute long cut of the track.

Two years and over a million sales of the album which shared the title tracks name, Summer and Moroder released a new ode to love, ‘I Feel Love’. A far cry from ‘Love to Love You Baby’, this track was up tempo, synthesiser driven with a four to the floor kick drum and along the top line Summer’s vocals floated in pure ecstasy “It’s so good, it’s so good it’s so good…”. ‘I Feel Love’ is without a doubt the pinnacle of love and sound coming together in the disco era, sonically summarising the feeling of being intertwined with a lover. The track has been widely credited as being the precursor to modern electronic music and was certified Platinum, which is not bad for a track that was originally released as the B-Side to the single ‘Can’t We Just Sit Down (And Talk It Over)’.

So get ready to get down with your lover this Valentines Day and if you’re by yourself don’t be down, just remember this quote from club queen Grace Jones –

“One boyfriend told me that I loved myself too much. I thought, Well, you can love a boyfriend too much, but you can’t love yourself too much. Sometimes you have to love yourself to keep yourself whole.”