pop. Madonna's career without Summer and "Bad Girls"? Unthinkable.
Bad Girls is the first major album to use synthesizer-based disco studio techniques in the service of pop-rock songs. Much of it is played on live instruments; the guitar solo in "Hot Stuff" is as universal as, say, the Lindsey Buckingham riff on Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way." But on uncannily biting and hook-y tunes such as "Can't Get to Sleep at Night," Summer and Moroder showed how dance music could kick like the meanest real-time rock & roll. For years after, an entire commercial strain of rock and pop would obsess about technology in ways that would revolutionize the sound of music, for both good (Duran Duran) and ill (Kajagoogoo).
This reissue contains a companion disc that collects Summer's previous and subsequent hits: the minimalist masterwork "I Feel Love" and the sweet, soaring "On the Radio." Like Bad Girls itself, it's just about unimproveable.
JAMES HUNTER
(RS 929, August 21, 2003)
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 "Sun
