Over the next year Terje Fjelde has agreed to listen to nothing but David Foster on his iPod. He’s loaded the thing with over 1,200 songs produced, arranged, composed, and/or played by David Foster. A deal with the devil? He keeps wondering.

It’s time for another Theme Week! I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what’s the theme, though. It should be pretty obvious.

I heard Donna Summer’s “Livin’ In America” (1982), produced by Quincy Jones, for the first time when I watched a documentary about Quincy released around the same time as his album Back On The Block in 1989. He had invited a bunch of hot rappers such as Ice T, Melle Mel, Big Daddy Kane and Kool Moe Dee to join him along with a stellar cast of musicians but, me being a very pale and very Scandinavian teenager, I just didn’t get the rap and hip hop thing at all in 1989. Well, I still don’t for the most part, but that’s another story. Anyway, I was for all purposes hoping for The Dude, Part 2 at the time of its release, and thus Back On the Block turned out to be a huge disappointment. It just didn’t sound smooth enough for me at the time by far, which I guess is kinda telling — and utterly and completely incomprehensible: Have you ever heard “Setembro (Brazilian Wedding Song)” or “The Secret Garden”? Smooth as silk. Or “Tomorrow (Better You, Better Me)” with a very young Tevin Campbell on lead vocals? The only thing with an edge on it is Tevin’s braces.

Still, that’s probably why I remember “Livin’ In America” so well from the soundtrack - it was one of very few tracks with Quincy’s smooth, early 1980s pop sound. I loved what I heard and went straight out and bought Donna Summer from 1982 and I was happy as a hippo for months, playing my new old Donna Summer album all the time whilst everybody else was listening either to the Stone Roses or Roxette. I was so out of touch with anything resembling hipness. Some things never change. (more…)

In 1979, Donna Summer could do no wrong — she was, in fact, riding high with three Top Ten hits in a row. So no one blinked when Summer and collaborators Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte decided her next album would be her third double-LP release in a row, an opus packed with 15 extended songs. Once Bad Girls was unleashed, Summer immediately notched two Number One hits in a row with the more-rock-than-disco “Hot Stuff” and the record’s title track. “Dim All the Lights” very nearly followed those singles to the top, stalling at number two for two weeks. After dominating radio all year with Bad Girls, Summer had yet another number one in ‘79 with a one-off duet with Barbra Streisand, “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough).” Summer fever was high.

So high that even album tracks from Bad Girls were being pulled for radio and club play. “Sunset People” (download) was the last song on the album, a closing ode to Los Angeles nightlife (giving shout-outs to the Rainbow Bar & Grill, the Riot House and the Whisky) that was huge in the clubs and even crossed over to some Top 40 radio stations. Full of sequencers and drummer Keith Forsey’s metronome foot, the bubbly synth number recalls Moroder’s work with Sparks that same year, particularly “The Number One Song in Heaven.” I have vivid memories of “Sunset People” being a staple on Cleveland’s Disco 92, our local dance station that went all disco for about a year or two in the late ’70s. Of course, I was only four years old in 1979, so I’m mostly going by sense memory here. Honest. Ahem.

Summer was so hot that year, she even got her own TV special to promote Bad Girls, complete with über-campy dance numbers and “visualizations” of the songs. Check out this performance of “Sunset People” with Donna playing multiple roles, including a homeless woman. Make sure you stay tuned after that to see her do a live vocal for “Bad Girls” dressed as the flyest New Wave hooker ever! And waitaminnit! Is that Twiggy and Debralee Scott, aka “Hotsy Totsy” from Welcome Back, Kotter as two of the ladies of the night? Why, it is! And if that’s not enough star power for ya, how about Pat Ast? (more…)

DOWNLOAD THE FULL MIX HERE

As Prince said, “I think I wanna dance!” Sometimes in the weekly Mix Six shuffle it’s easy to forget the lasting impact of disco on the culture at large. Go to any wedding reception where there’s a DJ who can read the crowd, and soon enough you’ll be hearing some of the tunes featured here.

Disco was certainly loved — but also hated — when it originally surfaced in the popular culture of the ’70s. Many were praying that disco would ultimately implode and go away … forever!

Wrong! Hahaha.

“Jupiter,” Earth, Wind & Fire

The horns, the harmony, and the badass funk of it all. There’s just something about these EWF albums of the mid- to late ’70s that’s pure funk gold. Can I get a “Hell, yeah?” (more…)

Hey, Popsters! You’re back for more weekly mixing fun, eh? Good. I’m glad you’re here, and I hope this week’s mix starts to spark some discussion about when a particular genre of music surfaced from the underground and became mainstreamed. You’ll probably quibble with my choices, but that’s okay, because it’s tough to find one song that basically says, “This is the definitive point where, say, hard rock, grunge, ’90s bubblegum pop, new wave, or disco started.”

So what I’ve assembled for your enjoyment is a collection of songs that, for me, signaled that a musical genre had come up from the underground to become part of the mainstream. (more…)