Released: 1977
If one narrative played strongest in the 1970’s, it was sex. Gone were the hippie conjunctions of bad hygiene and weed impotence and as the decade came on strong, so did its shock troops. Once the domain of nasty bookshops and stained upholstery movie theatres, to show everybody how to do it the porn industry went overground too, taboo-breaking skin flick Emmanuelle playing to millions worldwide.
This didn’t go down at all well in curtain twitching places like Britain, but soon Donna Sommer wouldn’t have to worry about that, having gone to live and work in sixties Germany after leaving her hometown of Boston. With hedonism about to peak, in 1974 she met producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, with whom she formed a creative threesome. Two years later the whole thing caught fire as single Love to Love You Baby earned her a US release on the infamous Casablanca label, an outlet through which cocaine, bizarre marketing stunts and general debauchery flowed under its flamboyant owner Neil Bogart.
Love to Love You Baby became a massive transatlantic hit, with Summer allegedly moaning her way through 22 orgasms during a seventeen-minute running time (Going further, lotharios also maintained that this length matched your optimal bedtime performance whilst under the influence of Peruvian flake).
Moroder was working with the singer on ideas for the subsequent I Remember Yesterday album and via studio engineer Robby Wedel was shown how to synchronise multiple outputs from the temperamental Moog synthesiser: this revelation proved to be the technical basis for I Feel Love, a pounding sci-fi twerk beamed straight from the orgasmatron. If this was disco it felt like being entranced, the track’s celestial vocals taking listeners out to the edge of the known hedonistic galaxy, and then beyond it.
Its legacy is easy to point to, because it’s essentially all 20th century electronic dance music, with nods to Kraftwerk and a few other pioneers. But those dusty old relics with their patch cables and modulation indexes had failed to capture I Feel Love’s swing, it’s hazy eroticism, the ease with which you could imagine dancing as copulation without the niceties of speech or prior physical attraction. As much as it looked forward, it sent us back to our primal instincts, a prehistory where only rhythm could put you next to God. As the saying went in the years after it, the air got dirty and the sex got clean. So when celebrating our last decade of fornicating liberty, this remains the only song to fuck to.
The Voice Of Unreason 
An interesting song to place at #1, but then you never fail to surprise me Andy! I love(d) Donna Summer and this song,
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I think electronic music, whatever you want to call it or define it as, was more of a European thing than an American one until Chicago house, which was almost a decade later. I Feel Love, along with Kraftwerk, changed the face of late 20th music almost overnight, particularly in Northern Europe.
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