From a treatise on Bruce’s butt to an essay on Prince’s half-naked ass, more than 100 scholarly presentations at a recent Seattle conference uncovered the deeper meanings of pop music. Titles like “Supa Dupa Fly,” “White Noise Supremacists,” and “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” lured some 500 academics and journalists to the second annual Pop Conference at Experience Music Project, the institution funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, from April 10 to 13. Jampacked with the politics of bebop and deconstructionist analysis of hip-hop, the conference might sound ponderous to outsiders. But then, rock ‘n’ roll has never been about following the rules or being predictable.
Actually, the full name of the presentation on Springsteen’s behind was “Bruce’s Butt: Masculinity, Patriotism and Rock’s Ecstatic Body.” In an era of acronyms, from “btw” to J.Lo, it’s somewhat daunting to burrow through “papers” with 17-word titles, interrupted by semicolons — and even more astonishing to find them illuminating, inspiring and fun.
In a frenzy at the overhead projector, Tony Mitchell of the University of Technology in Sydney flailed photos of global hip-hop acts in a kind of poetry slam, as if proving that rap exists outside the U.S. Both the style and substance of his performance wowed the crowd of fellow professors, grad students, writers and musicians.
This meeting of writers and thinkers from around the pop-culture globe was meant to find common cause, according to Eric Weisbard, head of EMP’s education department. Was it a culture clash? While some attendees wore both academic and journalistic hats, both parties came slinging lingo, peppering their papers with music-industry slang or critical terms like “conflation” and “commodification.”
This brainiac approach may seem jarring. Highbrow analysis of pop music seems, at least at first, antithetical to rock’s spirit of rebellion, wreckage and debauchery. This kind of examination seems suited to loftier subjects than punk, disco, techno and karaoke. When references to Iggy Pop share a podium with Bela Bartók, it’s not about “lust for life.” Or is it?
Through the corridors of this colorful blob of a museum built by leading postmodern architect Frank O. Gehry, past the gift shop with its Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain posters, Beatles lunchboxes, T-shirts and paraphernalia, attendees crammed into the Learning Lab to hear University of London prof Marybeth Hamilton read an intriguing account on the unearthing of a rare collection of “race records.”
“Who knew the Delta blues was discovered under the bed of a closeted gay alcoholic living in a Brooklyn YMCA?” exclaims the wide-eyed Weisbard, grabbing a bite of turkey on focaccia between panels. The former Spin and Village Voice editor who organized this hybrid seminar explains, “It’s less formal than academic conferences and more risk-taking than industry conventions.” It might also be the only music gathering with empty hallways once a session starts. Everyone seemed as content with ivory-tower pursuits as they would be at Tower Records; collectively, they’ve written more than 50 books on subjects from Muddy Waters to heavy metal.
Greil Marcus, the author of “Lipstick Traces,” “Mystery Train,” and “The Dustbin of History” (and a former Salon columnist), launched the shindig with a keynote speech that tenderly invoked a series of songs spanning time and genre — from a 1929 version of “Man of Constant Sorrow” to the snappy rendition in the Coen brothers’ “O Brother Where Art Thou?” The plaintive promise and power of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” sucked the audience into his reverie.
Early the next morning, we heard Dionysian festivals compared to mosh pits, Pentecostal speaking in tongues connected to scat singers, and the tango linked to jazz. The so-called dean of rock critics, Robert Christgau, who’s been grading record albums from A+ to F for his Village Voice column since the 1960s, likened the revelry of ancient Greeks to “Rock’s Ecstatic Release.”
The conference’s airy theme, "Rewriting the Story of Popular Music," was a revisionist’s wet dream. After all, it’s still early days for the study of 20th century tunes. While "Chicken Boogie" sounds as lively today as when it was brand-new 60 years ago, even Grace Jones’ hits are now more than 20 years old. Is this historical and sociological dissection a form of spindle-gazing contemplation to pump up the volume on "low" culture — or a worthy inquiry? Rock music isn’t rocket science, but the gobs of insightful material at the Pop Conference rendered what might seem to some a ridiculous pursuit into something sublime.
Synapses snapped when Ned Sublette of Qbadisc Records suggested that not all roads in pop-music history lead to rock ‘n’ roll. He proposed Cuban music as the elephant in pop’s kitchen, arguing its central influence from the big band era to a string of rock hits (“Rock Around the Clock,” “Daytripper,” “Louie Louie”). Dazzling his audience with facts and sound effects, Sublette described a fertile musical crescent from New Orleans to Haiti, with Havana as its clearinghouse.
Heady stuff for 10:30 in the morning, but the receptive crowd was jazzed as they dashed to soak up more. Historians, sociologists and ethno-musicologists rubbed tweedy elbows with denim-sleeved writers. With more than 100 speakers spread throughout three simultaneous sessions, it was a scramble to catch every provocative idea or insightful theory.
The “Women in Question” panel was a lively rally at Rock and Roll Grad School. Lee Ann Fullington from the University of Liverpool related her survey on the male preserve of record shops. Gayle Wald raved about Rosetta Tharpe, a 1940s blues guitarist who “played like a man.” Professor/musician Lisa Louise Rhodes reassessed rock’s sexual double standard with moderator and Austin Chronicle writer Margaret Moser, who unfurled tales drawn from her years as a groupie.
“There’s a different approach at strictly academic conferences, which can feel like a sentencing,” said Rhodes. “More than one or two slight attempts at levity are viewed as undercutting the seriousness of your work. At EMP, everyone seemed to be having such a good time.”
Both the profane and the profound filled this music nerd-fest. Speakers addressed the erasure of blackness in indie rock, the theft of blackness by white songbirds, and the preservation of whiteness in “Celtic Confederate” tunes. Yet the head trip rarely felt like a lecture. Barnard College professor Donna Gaines, an intimate of the Ramones, who wrote “Misfit’s Manifesto: The Spiritual Journey of a Rock & Roll Heart,” quoted sociologist Emile Durkheim as well as late guitar legend Johnny Thunders.
Whether participants were waxing rhapsodic on Jeff Buckley, going dissonant on the White Stripes or, like novelist and musician Darcey Steinke, offering a lyrical ode to Elvis, the proceedings often felt like George Sand lying under Chopin’s piano for a visceral listening experience.
It wasn’t all weighty. A rousing lunchtime concert by Jon Langford of the Mekons offered pithy three-chord songs and witty anecdotal commentary on his “Sorry Life in the Punk Rock Trenches.”
The “Ego Trip” round table was another crowd pleaser, struggling to answer various hip-hop-related questions, including “Who’s the next Tupac?” The collective of writers of color who self-published “Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists” offered such zingers as “Wu-Tang Clan is the Kiss of rap,” and led a singalong to Missy Elliot, advising the audience to replace “nigga” with “ninja.”
Academics, of course, aren’t hampered by such journalistic considerations as word count and deadline. “Writers have to know how to swing a sentence, how to make (occasionally) complex ideas seem simple and/or sexy,” notes Pat Blashill, a freelancer for Wired and Rolling Stone who presented “Darth Vader Was a Black Man” (on the topic of techno “Afronauts”). “Academics, on the other hand, don’t have to squeeze ideas into a small space next to photos of J.Lo in the shower.”
Blashill says he welcomes the breadth of exploration and the opportunity to grapple with larger questions. “The conference forced writers to step up to the plate and deliver bona fide ideas, and forced assistant professors to drop the $20 words.” To communicate and entertain. Arguably, if the conference’s “Discoteria” panel had happened under the twirling lights of EMP’s “A Decade of Saturday Nights” exhibit, next to Labelle costumes and Studio 54′s moon and spoon, it might have packed more punch.
One of the final panels provided a delicious sendup of academic papers by addressing “sludge,” those ubiquitous, crass formal devices found in every clichéd piano intro and guitar lick, across almost every pop genre. “The E String Scrape” featured examples from Bon Jovi, Michael Bolton and REO Speedwagon. “The Cowbell as Party-Down Signifier” cited a slew of examples, including Nazareth and Blue Oyster Cult — each excerpt drawing louder and cheaper laughs.
British professor John Street, who presented “Pop Star as Politician,” reflected on the big picture: “These conferences serve to, 1) make one feel inadequate, and 2) revive enthusiasm. This worked brilliantly on both counts.”
Despite the overwhelming blur, those gathered were stoked and insatiable for discourse at the reception. “It’s as much about building a new kind of community, as presenting ideas,” says Weisbard. “Almost every person had a different experience, which is true to the spirit of popular music.”
He’s editing a volume of conference papers for Harvard University Press to publish next year. “People care when writing is good, when thoughts are new, when culture has some zing to it,” Weisbard says. “All we can try to do is make something interesting and let the sparks fly.”
Lisa Louise Rhodes admits that being a pop fan can make her feel like an outcast in the academic world. “But at EMP, among so many bright people who think pop music matters,” she says, “it felt like coming home.”
This is the second story in the Trust Me On This series, which runs through Father's Day. You can read the other entries
here. Dear Kiddos,
Hey, you turkeys. Listen up. I need you to listen for five minutes. I’m going to impart a little wisdom. You can take it or leave it. For what it’s worth, I’d rather you took it.
The advice is this: David Bowie’s “Hunky Dory” is a perfect album, and, since perfect albums are a rare commodity, it is worthy of deep and repeated listenings.
I’m listening to “Hunky Dory” as I write this. How many times have I listened to this, my favorite record? Like a million? And it never gets old.
I discovered “Hunky Dory” by accident. I was a sad, lonely little kid. Eleven years old and obsessed with Joan Jett, another artist I imagine you kids would enjoy. Back then, the radio was still a real thing that people listened to, believed in and learned from. I stayed up past my bedtime one Saturday night during the Christmas holiday to listen to a weekly show called “The King Biscuit Flower Hour” featuring a concert by my secret girlfriend, Joan Jett. At the end of the set, she played a cover of a song that would forever change the course of my budding musical tastes, “Rebel Rebel.” As it turned out, “Rebel Rebel” would never be one of my favorite Bowie tunes, but I could detect, within its lyric, a narrative voice to which I could relate. Like really relate.
I was a latchkey kid, a thing that no longer exists. Both of my parents worked, so every weekday after school, I had a few hours wherein I could do whatever the heck I wanted. What I usually wanted to do was go to Half Price Books & Records. The next Monday, released from the grim confines of Armstrong Elementary, I walked to Half Price where I found exactly one David Bowie album. I brought home “Hunky Dory,” marveling at its weird, androgynous cover. In those pre-Internet days, one was always left with questions. Is that David Bowie on the album cover? Is that person a guy or a lady? Is it a painting or some sort of artsy photo? Is this even rock ‘n’ roll, or is it some other kind of music, the name of which has been kept a secret from me?
It was just that, some other, new kind of music. New to me, anyway. This album, recorded when I had been less than a year old, opened doors for me. And I thought I caught a glimpse of my own future. My family’s house on Gillon Avenue was empty when the needle dropped on Side A. “Changes,” turned up to top volume, was my anthem from the first line of the first verse. “Still don’t know what I was waiting for,” indeed. This was what I had been waiting for. Putting up with all the cruel dullards in my grade school, all the teachers and coaches, all the stupid kids and mean adults, had been almost unbearable. Suddenly, I wasn’t alone.
“Hunky Dory” is not a kids’ record, but there is certainly a preponderance of imagery relating to childhood. “Changes” speaks of “these children that you spit on.” “Oh You Pretty Things” has the song’s object driving his “mama and papa insane.” In “Kooks,” the singer begs his own kid to stay, reassuring the lucky little guy that “we believe in you.” At the time, I needed to hear that sentiment. I went back to it over and over again throughout the difficult years of adolescence. David Bowie was not my dad, but he was there in a pinch.
As the album goes on, it gets weirder. And deeper. And darker. “Quicksand” offers up an epic take on the human experience, turning on a phrase that would echo dangerously throughout those most perilous years of my youth, “knowledge comes with death’s release.” I didn’t understand, but I did understand, if you catch my drift. These were meditations on the difficulty of everyday life, and the insane nature of our very existence. Heavy, beautiful stuff.
Antidotes appear in the record’s latter portion. “Happiness is happening/dragons have been bled … fear’s just in your head,” Bowie proclaims in the goofy-but-right-on “Fill Your Heart.” Then he proceeds to introduce the listener to Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan. And then comes “Queen Bitch,” wherein we meet Bowie’s longtime foil, the most underrated guitarist in rock history, Mick Ronson. The riff in “Queen Bitch” hints at what is to come on Bowie’s next LP, “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” Bowie’s breakthrough album, but “Hunky Dory” is still pre-fame Bowie at his folkie best.
Finally, he leaves us with the epic poem that is “Bewlay Brothers.” As an 11-year-old, I played it repeatedly in an attempt to decipher this song’s meaning. I wrote out the lyrics in my journal, hoping to make sense of them. To no avail. I did know that something had gone horribly wrong, there was madness and sadness, and then the record was over. Just like that.
Again and again, I listened. Memorized. Marveled. Sang along. When I could take it no longer, I found a guitar teacher and learned how to do these things myself. Well, not exactly these things, but my own version thereof. My early songs were such a pale imitation of early-’70s Bowie, that I could have been sued — had anyone ever heard my early songs. It’s quite possible that I spent the whole of my teenage years singing with an English accent. As they say, mistakes were made.
I never got over Bowie. Especially “Hunky Dory.” Many of his other records have remained favorites: “Low,” “Ziggy Stardust,” “Station to Station.” But “Hunky Dory” was my first love. I caught a lot of grief for my borderline-obsessive Bowie fandom. Kids at school used it as ammunition in their attacks on my masculinity. Did I care? Sure. Did I care enough to throw Bowie under the bus and pretend to withdraw my admiration for this artist who set me on the path I knew I was destined to follow? Hell no. David Bowie was and is my hero.
Listen, kids: I want you to hear “Hunky Dory” because I think you will love it. Like I said, it’s a perfect record, and how often do those come along? But the real reason I want you to listen to “Hunky Dory” is because, in its 11 tracks, you will find the clues that will lead you to an understanding of me, your dad. You’ll see signposts pointing the way to the path I chose in life.
Making music for a living isn’t easy. Many things about it are tough as hell: The touring and its requisite absences; the self-absorption; the occasional financial insecurity; the mood swings one attributes to the “artistic personality.” This life, however, is what I was made for. This calling is the only one I’ve ever known. I’m not curing cancer or solving the global hunger crisis. I’m making music. But there is a certain hazy nobility in that vocation. Somewhere, an 11-year-old kid may be putting on an album of mine and discovering that the universe isn’t a meaningless jumble of coincidences, that there is purpose to be found in these three-minute constructions of music and lyrics. Some small but elegant meaning.
Heck, before you guys came along, that was all I had. The great thing is that now I have everything.
This article originally appeared on
Imprint.
“When did music become so important?” That’s Don Draper from last week’s “Mad Men,” set in 1966. Later in the episode he turns off “Tomorrow Never Knows,” from the Beatles album “Revolver,” and walks out of the room.
art: Rick Griffin
There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is — do you, Mr. Draper? One year later, Rolling Stone magazine will make its debut, followed soon by “Rock and Other Four Letter Words.”
“Rock,” a 250-plus-page Bantam paperback, was published in January 1968 and subtitled “Music of the Electric Generation.” It was one of the first books of its kind, chronicling a cultural revolution that was still in the midst of its own creation. Crammed with black-and-white portraits of bands and musicians, it’s part oral history, part visual LSD trip. One of its fold-out spreads has an intricate, circuitlike diagram that connects over a hundred names, from the Butterfield Blues Band, the Beach Boys, and the Byrds to Busby Berkeley, Brubeck and Bach.
The editor-designer was a writer named J Marks. The photographer for most of the images was Linda Eastman, who went on to work for Rolling Stone and — oh, yes — marry Paul McCartney.
By the sheer force of its graphic presentation, ”Rock and Other Four Letter Words” conveys the mid-1960s music scene’s spirit, vitality and relevance.
“In this hour of the ever-changing season, may our tears not douse the fire in our hearts.”
That’s a guy named Michael Pless singing “Something’s Got to Give.” Even without hearing the song, you can surely imagine the essential elements: Plaintive acoustic strumming, an earnest vocal, and an air of polite outrage to match the stilted syntax and hoary platitudes. Welcome to “Occupy This Album,” the collection of protest-minded songs released by Occupy Wall Street. Sprawling across four CDs and a slew of bonus digital tracks, this behemoth set includes 100 (why not 99?) new and previously released tracks from artists representing a range of generations, genres, backgrounds, settings, and styles. Folkies join hands with rappers; ominous post-rock marches alongside peppy radio pop. There’s spoken-word poetry, tribal percussion, earnest singer-songwriter fare. Even a bit of jazz.
Especially with Occupy reaching a crossroads in summer 2012 — a time when it needs to reassess its ideals, its accomplishments, its methods and its artifacts — “Occupy This Album” plays like a state-of-the-field survey of the protest song. From Jeff Mangum covering the Minutemen to the anonymous drum circles that soundtracked the demonstrations in real time, music has been a constant presence in the movement, although it’s not quite clear what role it has played. The new album portrays a movement with a broad scope and an admirably varied constituency, but the same criticisms that have been leveled against Occupy can also be applied to “Occupy This Album:” There is general unease but no clear direction forward. There is outrage but no plan. There is deep feeling but no clear message.
Ostensibly, there should be something on “Occupy This Album” for everyone to love, but that also means there is more than enough here for everyone to hate. It’s an unwieldy tracklist, almost daring you play it front to back. Of course, it’s pointless to review a 100-track release the same way you would approach a studio album, where functionality and some sense of logical progression are crucial. But there’s no consistent development of political or musical ideas weaving these songs together, nothing to link them or to justify this particular sequencing. As a result, “Occupy This Album” cannot make a statement as an album. In one sense, this release mirrors the leaderless ethos of the movement, which stridently preserves the democracy of the demonstrations. While that idea has certainly energized the Occupy protest, it makes for an amorphous blob of music and a messy, often frustrating listening experience.
But they mean well, right? It’s a charity album after all, with each disc sold separately and with all proceeds benefiting Occupy directly. You’d probably be better off contributing directly to the cause and just making your own mix of politically minded music. You might even have some of these songs in your iTunes already, although why you’d want to include Lucinda Williams’ drippy “Blessed” or Mogwai’s interchangeable “Earth Division” is beyond me.
The music that actually is new — that purports to find direct inspiration in either the righteousness of the demonstrators or the plight of the 99 percent — is generally unimaginative, hokey, disappointingly safe. Most of these artists address these economic issues either through narrative or through high-minded rhetoric. The latter produces the most lackluster results: Jackson Browne’s “Which Side Are You On?” which he has been touting for several months now, turns out to be political white noise, a gentle fist bump to the like-minded that barely puts across either side of the debate. At least it’s better than My Pet Dragon’s epiphany on “Love Anthem”: “Only love can save us now.” To their credit, they sing it like they might actually believe it.
The storytellers have more success, if only because they’re willing to entertain a bit more grit, a bit less blind hope. Featuring Joan Baez and Steve Earle, James McMurtry’s “We Can’t Make It Here” sounds downright curmudgeonly as it surveys the state of the working class in an economy that regularly sends its manufacturing jobs overseas. The song, however, goes a bit overboard when the trio decry litterbugs and graffiti artists.
One of the true standouts among these 100 tracks is Richard Barone’s ditty “Can I Sleep on Your Futon?” about a veteran-turned-singer who couch-surfs from one generous soul to the next. The verses are specific and soulful, as through he’s derived them explicitly from lived experience, and in that regard, the song could function as commentary on the music biz. But Barone stumbles over that massively awkward chorus, “Can I sleep on your futon?” It’s hard to imagine a crowd of protesters singing along.
If there is one overarching theme here, it is, vaguely, “history.” The past informs and even defines this music. Even the very idea of this type of compilations seems like a throwback to the CD’s heyday in the 1990s, when seemingly every charity, from NARAL to the Red Hot Organization, had its own release. It’s an impression reinforced by much of the music, especially hip-hop tracks by Born I Music and George Martinez & the Global Block Collective, whose lyrics and beats sound like they were scavenged from 1994. (For a better example of how hip-hop can address political themes, check out Killer Mike’s new track “Reagan.”)
Of course, there is a lot of folk music on “Occupy This Album.” That style has proved one of the most politicized musical forms of the 20th century, as lefties in the 1930s and 1940s adopted labor songs as battle cries. Clean-scrubbed, buttoned-up folkies like the Kingston Trio had some chart success in the 1950s, but they were quickly rendered obsolete by the Village bohemians reimagining the music as a vehicle for countercultural sentiments. That’s the model so many Occupyers are reverently appropriating, never suspecting that it might not be a natural fit for 21st-century dissent. The folk revivalists of the 1960s drew from the past as well, but took pains to update the music to the times: The mere fact that Dylan wrote new songs in this old style was revolutionary, alienating an older generation of folkie purists.
“Occupy This Album” obviously represents a counterculture, but too many of the artists are too caught up in role playing the past, which seems like an especially boomer enterprise. Michael Moore (yes, that Michael Moore) performs the most chipper version of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” imaginable, one that seems wholly unaware of the gritty realities of 2012, much less of 1964. (The less said about his skiffle version of the song, a hidden track on disc four, the better.) Perhaps the one artist who understands how to plumb history for present-day relevance is Loudon Wainwright III, whose wry “The Panic Is On” updates an 80-year-old tune originally penned by Hezekiah Jenkins (the cover originally appeared on Wainwright’s album “Ten Songs for the New Depression”). It’s an unusual artifact from the early 1930s, but there’s a sneaky observation about class disparity that sounds more disgusted and potent than anything else on the album.
Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about “Occupy This Album” is that the music is deeply conservative. There are so few moments that grab your attention or make you see the world differently. When Occupy already seems to be in danger of losing momentum, it’s hard to say whether the movement has failed to inspire these artists or the artists have failed to document the movement.
There is so much about Donna Summer that we didn’t know… and not just the cancer that took her life. Let’s start with her relationship to rock. Summer is quite understandably known as a disco singer, and quite rightly so. It was disco that made her, and she, as perhaps disco’s highest profile performer, who helped to shape the genre. But like a number of other disco artists — Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, the vocal trio Labelle and Chaka Khan all come to mind — Donna Summer was also a rocker. Yes, she grew up singing gospel, but she began her professional career as a ’60s rocker. She would describe this as her Janis Joplin phase, and she did indeed sing in a group that performed at the Psychedelic Supermarket — Boston’s version of Bill Graham’s Fillmore. She then went on to play a hippie in the Munich production of the rock musical “Hair,” and sported an enormous Afro inspired in large part by her hero, the black radical activist, Angela Davis. Although the disco music that she made with producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, and engineer Harold Faltermeyer provoked a fierce backlash from some aficionados of rock, this was a foursome that, as critic Dave Mash pointed out, functioned as a rock band, one in which Summer played a pivotal role as singer and songwriter. And then there is her singing. Listen to her hit “Hot Stuff,” and tell me that Summer could not sing rock.
Summer, who was strikingly beautiful, made some very steamy — some would say X-rated — music, most memorably with her first hit, 1975’s “Love to Love You Baby.” With Summer’s groans, moans and gasps powering the track, it broke new ground in its sexual explicitness. Promoted by her record company in explicitly sexual terms, and giving performances that made Tina Turner’s look tame, Summer soon found herself tagged the “Linda Lovelace of pop music.” She had seen this coming. In fact, she had not wanted to be the singer on that track, and agreed only to record the demo, and only then in a blackened studio where she sang, imagining that she was Marilyn Monroe giving herself over to orgasmic ecstasy. After producer Moroder convinced her to let him use her vocal, her record label president, seeing its bedroom potential, demanded a long-playing version that left the media debating whether the singer came 22 or 23 times. Rock critic Robert Christgau poked fun at the record with a review that consisted of three questions, “Did you come yet? Huh? Did you come yet?” Other reviews were more disparaging. But “Love to Love You Baby,” like much of her music, put female desire front and center in a way that it wasn’t in most rock music. Indeed, Summer’s music is inseparable from second-wave feminism’s emphasis on women’s sexual empowerment.
There is so much to say about Summer, who could have been a full-fledged personality had she not been pigeon-holed and dismissed as a disco tart. I was once on a radio program with her and, believe me, she was nobody’s fool. She described the “star-making machinery” as well as anyone. After she had already became famous she told Rolling Stone that her career sometimes felt like “this monstrous, monstrous force, this whole production of people and props that you’re responsible for, by audiences and everything that rules you until you take it upon yourself to be a machine… And at some point a machine breaks down.” Fame, she observed, diminished her, making her feel like nothing so much as a “commodity.” After falling into a debilitating depression and attempting suicide, she took control of her life again through Christianity.
In a way, I think one hears Summer confront her own commodification on her marvelous record “Bad Girls.” Although the music in the final, released version suggests otherwise, Summer isn’t celebrating prostitution on “Bad Girls.” Rather, she is confronting what she shares with those streetwalkers. “Now, you and me are just the same,” she sings. And if Summer sounds unusually exuberant as she yells out to a john, “Hey, mista, have you got a dime?” perhaps it’s because Summer understood what it meant to be made into a commodity and reduced to a seductive whisper. Tellingly, in a television interview some years later, Summer noted that “Bad Girls” marked the moment when she stopped being an object and became a subject. Let’s hope that in her death she inspires more writing that fully acknowledges the intelligent subjecthood of this disco diva and kick-ass rock and roller.
NEW YORK (AP) — Disco queen Donna Summer, whose pulsing anthems such as “Last Dance,” ”Love to Love You Baby” and “Bad Girls” became the soundtrack for a glittery age of sex, drugs, dance and flashy clothes, has died. She was 63.
Her family released a statement Thursday saying Summer died and that they “are at peace celebrating her extraordinary life and her continue legacy.”
Summer gained prominence during the disco era of the 1970s, and released a number of albums that have reach gold or platinum status, including the multiplatinum “Bad Girls” and “On the Radio, Volume I & II.” Her No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hits include “Hot Stuff” and “MacArthur Park.”
Her sound was a mix of genres, and helped her earn Grammy Awards in the dance, rock, R&B and inspirational categories.
She released her last album, “Crayons,” in 2008. She also performed on “American Idol” that year with its top female contestants.
(Credit: Benjamin Wheelock) 
