By blending sex and science fiction, Moroder and Bellotte have developed the aural counterparts to the visual imagery of discotheques. But the sex is of the skinflick variety, and the science fiction, pulp. Barry White's softcore bubblings seeded this erotic Muzak, and Moroder and Bellotte have brought
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it to full flower. Their synthesizer-based disco
is the music of the brave new world—music with a capacity to suggest comic-book erotic/astral configurations, limited only by the studio and synthesizer technologies that produce and reproduce it.
Using Donna Summer as a pansexual, Barbarella-style fantasy object, Moroder's and Bellotte's camp eroticism pulls humor out of the gap between pornography's fantasy of sexual insatiability and actual human sexual capacity. Summer's first hit, "Love to Love You Baby," fused Barry White's pseudoorgasmic approach with the synthesized Eurodisco style heralded by the Silver Convention's "Fly, Robin, Fly." "Love to Love You Baby" not only paved the way toward a more blatant eroticism, it exhibited a nearly total fragmentation of narrative musical structure and signaled disco's break from short radio forms to longer, more organic structures. In their next two albums with Summer, Moroder and Bellotte padded the chant with a diaphanous gloss and fluffed out the fantasy of perpetual gratification with love-comic scenarios. I Remember Yesterday finally revealed Summer as not just a centerfold gasp but a brassy pop/soul stylist in the Bette Midler-Melissa Manchester mold. But the album's signal achievement was "I Feel Love," in which they underlined Summer's dreamy vocals with jittery, diamond-hard synthesizer rhythms accented by a whiplash.
With Once upon a Time, Moroder-Bellotte-Summer diversify even further. Three sides—acts one, two and four—feature several styles of propulsive dance music designed for disco play. But act three is mostly R&B pop and contains two of the strongest nondisco cuts of Summer's career. "A Man like You" offers a clever pastiche of Gene Page's arrangement for "Get Closer." "Sweet Romance," a pop/soul tear-jerker with a catchy tune, has Summer hilariously praying to "father dear," with a quasi-baroque harpsichord behind her.
What comes as a surprise is how the ominously surreal atmosphere of the album's best disco sections belies the light escapism of the Cinderella concept. The feverish momentum in act one's most powerful segue — "Faster and Faster to Nowhere" and "Fairy Tale High"—suggests frantic stimulation rather than g
