sloth unleashed

There are songs that divide pop history into Before and After. Some are incontestable: “She Loves You,” “Anarchy in the U.K.,” “Rapper’s Delight.”  Others are up for debate. Sometimes a song splits pop time in half without that many people noticing its revolutionary implications (think Phuture’s “Acid Tracks”), the impact fully emerging only later. Other times, the rupture in business-as-usual happens in plain view, at the peak of the pop charts, and the effect is immediate. One such pop altering single that was felt as a real-time future-shock is “I Feel Love.”

Released 40 years ago, in early July 1977, “I Feel Love” was a global smash, reaching No. 1 in several countries (including the UK, where its reign at the top lasted a full month) and rising to No. 6 in America. But its impact reached far beyond the disco scene in which singer Donna Summer and her producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte were already well established. Post-punk and new wave groups admired and appropriated its innovative sound, the maniacal precision of its grid-like groove of sequenced synth-pulses. Even now, long after discophobia has been disgraced and rockism defeated, there’s still a mischievous frisson to staking the claim that “I Feel Love” was far more important than other epochal singles of ’77 such as “God Save the Queen,” “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” or “Complete Control.” But really it’s a simple statement of fact: If any one song can be pinpointed as where the 1980s began, it’s “I Feel Love.”