The stories are endless. There is the guy who in college used the same mix tape to impress three different girls — his girlfriend, a fling and a prospective second fling — simultaneously and got away with it. There is the 13-year-old whose musical existence was shaken out of a Sex Pistols-Beatles bipolarity by mix tapes from cooler, older friends. There is the guy who made a romantic tape called “You Best Believe I’m in Love” with nothing on it but New York Dolls songs.
In retrospect, the era of the mix tape — which began not long after Philips unveiled the audiocassette in 1963, crescendoed throughout the ’80s and probably peaked in the early ’90s — looks like a vast, unintentional folk art movement. Nearly every music-loving teenager in the country participated. Think of it this way: If every kid who spent a Saturday afternoon making a mix tape over the past 25 years had instead spent that time painting, sculpting or writing poetry, the ’80s and ’90s would be known as a period of unbridled renaissance in American outsider art. Now that era is over, the hours of tape-deck labor replaced by the drop-and-click production of the iPod playlist.
At least that’s the sense one gets from “Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture.” Edited by Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore, “Mix Tape” claims to be the first book wholly devoted to mix-tape culture. “Not only is [the era of the mix tape] over, but there are so many people who don’t even know what it is,” Moore said in a long phone interview. “Think of people born in the ’80s.”
He may be right. I was last given a mix tape maybe five years ago. Every mix I’ve made or received since then has been on CD, which, depending on whom you ask, is either completely different or exactly the same thing.
“Mix-tape culture” is a simple but sprawling subject.
“I have so many mix-tape stories it’s hard to know where to begin,” writes the filmmaker Allison Anders in “Mix Tape.” So do a lot of people. That’s why Moore decided to make the book a relationship study rather than an academic exploration of mix-tape culture. His approach was simple. “Basically the book was me just sort of filling in my email address book, and asking everybody: Do you still have any mix tapes around?” he says.
The result is a parade of mix-tape anecdotes from 80-plus alpha hipsters — noise rockers, punk artists, radical feminist writers, avant-garde video artists and the like. “I didn’t want it to be a ‘celebrities and their cats’ kind of book,” Moore says, “which it easily could have been. I could have gone after, like, Sofia Coppola, people that I am somewhat friendly with and who have high profiles in Hollywood. But I didn’t want to go that route with it.”
What do the mix tapes of the super-hip sound like? The mixes range from the arty-eclectic (Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Renaldo made a mix for his wife, the artist Leah Singer, that juxtaposes Nick Cave and Buddy Holly with dialogue from Godard’s “Une Femme est une femme”), to the subversive (the album-jacket artist Pushead’s tapes are — what else? — barrages of early ’80s punk) to the ironic-redneck (Ahmet Zappa’s ’80s cock-rock mix comes with the following warning: “Sensitive pussies should not listen to this awesome set of ditties. This mix is filled with the power of rock and is fueled by Satan himself”). Designer Kate Spade’s entry is by far the most mainstream. Like your older sister, in high school she would drive around and smoke cigarettes to a soundtrack of David Bowie’s “Changes,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.”
All these tapes, whether compilations of avant-punk or classic rock standards, have a common purpose: to communicate an emotion or idea — to a new friend, a potential lover, or even to oneself. The mix tape, Moore says, is “sort of a safe-sex thing: It’s sharing music instead of sharing germs.” The romance comes not only from the emotion expressed by a series of songs, but also from the sheer effort that it takes to plan and execute a mix. “The time spent implies an emotional connection with the recipient,” writes Dean Wareham of Luna. “It might be a desire to go to bed, or to share ideas. The message of the tape might be: I love you. I think about you all the time. Listen to how I feel about you. Or, maybe: I love me. I am a tasteful person who listens to tasty things. This tape tells you all about me.”
“Mix tapes are like matchmaker forms,” Moore writes. For budding couples they can test compatibility. Welcome to my world, the mix tape says. If you end up sleeping over on a regular basis, this is the music you’ll have to listen to. Why don’t you make me a tape, too, so I know you’re not into Simply Red? Phrased negatively, making a mix tape for someone other than your girlfriend is a form of cheating. In the film version of Nick Hornby‘s book “High Fidelity,” probably the mix tape’s cultural zenith, John Cusack’s character, Rob Gordon, nearly wrecks a relationship by making a mix for another girl. He might as well have been caught with panties in his messenger bag. It doesn’t matter that he never gets further than flirting. Making a mix tape for another girl is only a notch below actual infidelity.
For rock snobs like the fictional Rob Gordon and record-store geeks everywhere, the mix tape has an additional purpose: to brainwash someone, to alter their musical taste. Like most people, I would imagine, I got my biggest share of these in college, when I had indie-rocker friends with enough spare time to make me grungy compilations of abrasive screamo, the covers scrawled with obscure, vulgar band names and bizarre symbols. I was brainwashed into an affection for Robyn Hitchcock by an indoctrination tape that my friends and I repeatedly stole from one another over the years, a tape I still have in my desk drawer.
In a way, “Mix Tape” is a book-length elegy that rests on the idea that the mix tape can exist only on the black-and-gold Maxell. The mix CD, now standard fare at wedding receptions and in my Brooklyn neighborhood’s hipper jukeboxes, doesn’t have the same allure. “In the future, when social scientists study the mix tape phenomenon, they will conclude — in fancy language — that the mix tape was a form of ‘speech’ particular to the late 20th century, soon replaced by the ‘play list,’” writes Dean Wareham. That the book was published at all argues that the era of the mix tape is over. If it weren’t, then why put out a book about it?
This kind of cassette fetishism is part nostalgia and part technical snobbery. For Moore, only analog tape can please what he calls the “ear-heart.” Digital technology “doesn’t have the physicality of analog tape — the friction on the head like that,” he says.
But does format really matter? Some say a digital mix isn’t as special because it doesn’t carry the weight of hours of labor that a well-done mix cassette does. With a laptop, there’s no mapping out the ebb and flow of your song list to make sure you don’t run out of tape in the middle of the last song. Digital technology, detractors say, is too slick, too easy. But even Moore, a self-professed cassette junkie who still uses cheap tape decks onstage, admits that the mix CD is an acceptable successor.
“Maybe it doesn’t take the same amount of physical effort,” he says, “but that’s not the point. I think it takes the same amount of psychological effort, or romantic effort.” Indeed, the true challenge of the mix tape — selecting the right music and arranging it in a thoughtful manner — is at least as tricky and probably even more difficult with a laptop and CD burner as it was with a boom box. In both cases, the mix is governed by the same compositional considerations: You need a narrative structure, an internal logic, a strong opening, an appropriate and preferably surprising ending.
The challenge these days is that with a world of file sharing at your fingertips, the choices are endless. Time was you only had your own record collection to choose from when making a mix tape. Now you have millions of people’s MP3 collections — truly millions, possibly billions, of songs to choose from, not to mention snippets from movies, jingles, bits of famous speeches or bits of “dialogue” from the Paris Hilton video. It can all be a bit paralyzing. In the age of file-sharing communities such as Soulseek, making a mix CD is like trying to make a professional-grade audio collage — your own personal Beck album.
All this raises the question: Is the mix tape really an art form? Literary critic Matias Viegener, writing in “Mix Tape,” offers the most convincing case that it is. “The mix tape is a list of quotations, a poetic form, in fact: The cento is a poem made up of lines pulled from other poems,” he argues. There are differences, of course. You can’t perform a formalist analysis on a mix tape; unlike with, say, a poem, not every word is there intentionally. In fact, one of the most vexing problems the mix maker faces is that rarely does an entire song express what you’re trying to say; most often you choose a song because of one particular element — a chorus, a verse or a mood — but another part of the song often betrays you. Still, the mix taper faces the same choices as the writer: what to include, what to exclude, where to start, where to end, what to emphasize and what to hide between the lines.
Besides, for a large part of an entire generation, a good mix tape carries more emotion and potential for transport than any book, film or individual song. People never tire of mix tapes. They keep them until they lose them; they never throw them out. Instead, they wear them out or spill bong water all over them and still refuse to get rid of them, despite the urgings of girlfriends, boyfriends, fiancées, wives and husbands. No matter what kind of satellite-linked, GPS-enabled iPod mutation kids of the future will carry, a good number of them will still grow up and fall in and out of love to the sound of the mix, however it’s delivered.
But clearly there is something special about the mix tape, a physicality that digital technology can’t replicate, something significant enough that Moore was able to fill a book just by e-mailing everyone in his Rolodex. The difference between analog and digital mixes isn’t as dramatic as cassette junkies would argue. But the difference is real enough that when someone puts together “Playlist: The Art of iPod Culture,” those of us who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s probably won’t be reading.
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) 
