EVIL EVIL EVIL!!! How dare Rolling Stone hate side 3!!!!! I love those ballads! Who do I have to go bitchslap? ;-)

Hey - is this appropriate content for a blog? I'm still learning here! LOL

Bad Girls - A Seventies
Masterpiece!

Here's a great review of this unforgettable piece of art (from Rolling Stone Magazine). Anyway, I must disagree with the things said about the ballads. The whole side 3 showcases a little known side of Donna: she's an amazing composer and a wonderful performer of slow songs.

Had it been trimmed from two discs to one, Donna Summer's Bad Girls could have been an end-of-the-decade, Seventies masterpiece, seizing and encapsulating this moment in pop history. Even with side three's ultraschlock ballads and side two's erratic rockdisco cuts, it still ranks as the only great disco album other than Saturday Night Fever. Indeed, Bad Girls picks up where the John Travolta movie's sentimentalized, everybody's-a-star pop philosophy left off. If everyone's a star, it follows that everyone's also a commercial product, right? If that's true, where do you draw the line between being a self-created object of erotic fantasy and a hooker?

The notion that the world's a brothel is hardly new to pop music. Bette Midler gets a lot of laughs from imitating a bawd, and, on Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, Joni Mitchell paralleled imperialism to prostitution. Donna Summer, however, doesn't exploit the sexual jungle for humor or "art," but for sheer raunchy exuberance. In a move as naive as it is audacious, the singer herself writhes on the auction block, playing as hot-to-trot a streetwalker as ever sashayed down Broadway. Though the concept isn't developed as consistently as it might have been—the hooker-slanted tunes are interspersed with conventional love songs — Bad Girls amounts to a virtual paean to commercial sex.

Summer's vocals are wonderfully right for the part, and she stretches her chameleonlike voice to new limits, adding the role of rock & roll singer to her already established sex-kitten and Las Vegas-schlockmistress poses. The breakthrough cut is "Hot Stuff," a sizzling plea for action, whose slightly retarded, toughened disco rhythm and stinging Jeff Baxter guitar solo suggest Foreigner-style rock, without rutting the energy in metallic sludge. Summer's characteristic coyness is replaced by a hard-boiled, street-cookie directness that makes Linda Ronstadt seem positively demure.

The energy and fun are magnificently sustained on sides one and four. "Bad Girls," with its nifty "beep-beep, toot-toot" chant/hook, cheerfully evokes the trashflash vitality of tawdry disco dolls cruising down the main drag on Saturday night. The streamlined pop swing of "Love Will Always Find You" and "Walk Away" smoothly integrates Maria Muldaur-like nostalgia into the pop-disco mainstream. Summer's never sounded this playful and sophisticated. "Dim All the Lights" flaunts a saucy, Latin-flavored proposition, while "Our Love" is the apotheosis of every Sixties girl-group tear-jerker, updated for disco. Wailing in front of discofied African drums, Donna Summer sounds like the Shirelles reincarnated as a mightily love-struck Bionic Woman. In "Lucky," the pulpy saga of a one-nighter, the singer meows in front of a plunging, suction-cup synthesizer whose salacious slavering practically defines lasciviousness.

The closest thing to a social comment on Bad Girls comes in "Sunset People," a sweeping, high-rise view of Hollywood. Against an icy refrain of "doin' it right — night after night," the song telescopes the nightmarish glamour world of the Sunset Strip—with its teenage prostitutes, billboards, foreign cars and star worship — into an evocation of pleasureseeking as cold as it is tantalizing. If there's a moral here, it's in the music's ominous suggestion of the boredom beyond glitter and in the lyrics' telegraphed equation of the disco ethos with Hollywood and hooking. "Sunset People" just might be the disco culture's "A Day in the Life."

In one of the photos on the LP's inner sleeve, Donna Summer's co-producer, Giorgio Moroder, poses as her pimp. That's as good a metaphor as any for their musical interaction. Moroder's technique simultaneously mocks and exalts the star, who becomes both a goddess and a sideshow attraction in a futuristic technosex amusement park. Though this record's production contains nothing as startlingly novel as the sequenced bass synthesizer of "I Feel Love," the best tracks strike a perfect blend of German Eurodisco and American rock and soul that ultimately transcends the disco environment. Bad Girls' aural style is a lot sparer than the mechanized swirls of "Mac-Arthur Park Suite" and Once upon a Time....The new album's sound effects — e.g., the backward tape loops that sound like speeding cars in "Sunset People"— seem integral to the material.

Bad Girls' only serious lapse is side three, which consists of four sappy ballads, all of them cowritten by Summer. Working with lyrics that are embarrassingly mawkish, the singer overemotes in a painfully flat, syrupy sob, while the Eurodisco-pop synthesis that works so beautifully elsewhere collapses completely in these lengthy, unstructured weepers.

Such gross miscalculation shouldn't really come as a surprise, however, since Summer is truly a left-field phenomenon. Like Marilyn Monroe, whom she consciously emulates, Donna Summer is a gigantic but primitive talent whose reckless abandon and astonishing innocence (dumbness?) are two sides of the same coin. How else could she give herself so totally to the role of sex symbol? Summer is the Fifties' child-woman sexual ideal "liberated" into a Seventies, multiorgasmic Cosmopolitan clone — an inflatable sex machine as insatiable as she is helpless. But like Monroe, Summer also remains a true naif. She's more a monstrous reflection than a cynical projection of our collective libido. I guess the souls of our archetypes don't change, only their manners.

Two records ago, on Once upon a Time..., Donna Summer turned Cinderella into a disco fable. On Bad Girls, Cinderella has grown up to be a whore, and Prince Charming a john. Nowadays there's a ball every night down at the discothèque, and Happily Ever After is just another low-priced "zipless fuck." (RS 295)

Ok - I'm here. Now I don't know what to say. LOL Can you tell I'm a blog newbie?

Don't let this delicious Donna Summer honey cake out in the rain. But if you do, you'll have the recipe again. LOL
Courtesy of Emerson:
Donna Summer Honey Cake

Mix the following ingredients in a blender:
02 cups of milk (300ml)
01 cup of raw sugar (150gr)
01 cup of honey
01 teaspoon of powder cinnamon
01 teaspoon of powder cloves
02 eggs
01 cup of instant chocolate

Blend the following ingredients in an electric mixer:
02 cups of wheat flour
01 teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate
01 soupspoon baking powder
04 soupspoons of margarine

Add the ingredients mixed in the blender to the ones stirred in the electric mixer and beat them until they are fully blended. Pour batter into prepared cake pan. Bake in preheated oven for 40 to 45 minutes. After baking melt a bar of chocolate and cover the cake with it.

hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

A Letter to Donna Summer.
I begin to write these lines as MacArthur Park starts to play in my CD set. It's my favourite one. Right in front of me I can see a picture of you. In fact, it's the cover of the laser disc "A Hot Summer Night With Donna". I'm not totally sure, but I guess that picture was taken during the performance of that very song.

Actually, there are lots and lots of icons related to my Diva in my house.Yes, I have to admit: I am that thing people used to call a fan.

The only purpose of having all these memorabilia is kind of bring you closer to me, to my life.

Sometimes I wonder how can a man feel such affection for someone that he haven't at least ever talked to? But this feeling has been going on and on for over 20 years.

Some may say it would be a kind of lack of maternal love or even any other psychological explanation. Well, I really don't care about explanations, even though I'm an adult, as they say.

But when I'm listening to my so beloved Donna, I feel like I was a child. There's a deep intense pleasure inside that only children can feel. And I thank you, Donna, for that.

If I'm sad or somebody has brought me down, I just listen to your records and I'm ready for everything.

In the golden disco era, I used to worship you as you were a goddess or a queen. But, as time went by, I was able to realise that you were much more than just a diva or any other kind of showbiz product. All the things you have done for people who need help showed me your kindness and made me learn that "my" Donna is a real fantastic HUMAN BEING!

After nearly two decades I was lucky enough to see you live twice. It was back in 1992 and 1995 when you finally came to Brazil (where I live). Those were two nights of a completely dream come true.

By the first time (1992), you had just released the album "Mistaken Identity" and recorded the song "Friends Unknown". God knows what I felt when I put my eyes on those lyrics. Then I realised that you were grateful to us, your fans, for having stood beside you all over the years.

Well, Donna, I have to say: I am truly grateful too. Grateful for you who was there all the time. Maybe, you'll never know just how much you've stood by me.

Good times, bad times. I was aware when you were suffering and I sympathized with you. Maybe the positive vibrations I (and millions of fans) had in mind for you took some effect since you wonderfully overcame the problems. Just like you did to me all those years, and, of course, you never knew.

Things were even more wonderful in the last time I attended to your concert, in 1995, since I was in the first line. I could never expect to be so close to you.

Upon leaving the theather, I found myself reflecting over all those moments I had just lived. Yes, definitely, that so distant star called Donna Summer came real close to my soul. In a way that will never be disconnected.

In the end, I was able to come to the conclusion that, in my life, THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A YOU, DONNA.

Donna Summer has finally entered the world of weblogs too! On this blog, me and my friends intend to post our thoughts, ideas and current feelings about her, her amazing career, releases, etc.
Thanks for visiting it.