I Feel Love is Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s 1977 disco anthem.
It’s THE song that signaled the beginning of electronic dance music.
Its production is almost entirely built on synthesized sounds.
There’s a propulsive bassline with a delay effect,
a four-on-the-floor kick drum,
Snare hits and hi-hats,
and Donna Summer’s soaring vocal.
These elements make for a dance track that
is hypnotic in its repetition.
I Feel Love is a song that illustrates just how much disco changed pop music.
Not only through its sound and structure, but in the newly invented vinyl format that
gave it a natural home:
A 12 inch single.
This is a 7-inch single, it pretty much ruled pop music since the beginning of rock and roll.
It’s the format that powered jukeboxes, teen record players, and most importantly
the radio.
It was a small, cheap, and durable record that, when spun at 45rpm, was just large enough
to fit three and a half minutes of good audio on each side.
You’ve probably heard it called a “45.”
This chart shows just how much the 7-inch single dominated pop music.
From the 1950s through the 60s the average length of number one hit songs averaged about
2.5 to 3.5 minutes.
Paul: It was only in pop music that there tended to be this sense that it needed to
be three, three and a half minutes, and that was radio and because of the seven inch format.
That's Paul Morely. He's known for a lot of things.
I'm an author, critic, broadcaster, and occasional musician and occasional remixer.
Okay, back to the story.
Those 3 minute singles had become a standard on the radio, but dance clubs demanded a totally
different musical experience.
In the early 1970s in New York City a handful of scrappy DJs made the dancefloor more important
than ever.
One of them was Nicky Siano.
Nicky: I owned a club called the Gallery, which was the template for every club in the later '70s.
At his club, Siano figured out the best songs and techniques to keep people dancing.
Nicky: There’s this song called Cymande called by Bra.
“Dun dun dun dun dun.”
And we would take that record and play it over and over and just go back and forth and
back and forth with that break.
By using two turntables, sometimes 3, DJs like Siano could make that break last forever.
Nicky: Flipping those forty fives, that's work.
That is work.
It was work because the naturally short length of 45s left little time for DJs to plan their
next move.
So, they started searching for longer material to work with.
Eddie Kendrick’s “Girl You Need a Change of Mind” is often cited as one
of the first disco records.
Nicky: When that record came on it filled the dance floor.
And it was peak record, anywhere you went in New York City.
It was a gospel-inspired track that had an extended two minute break.
The single version was over six minutes long.
The only way it fit on a 45 was because it was split it across two sides of the record.
It bastardized the song.
I had to play it on the LP.
I just felt the fidelity, everything, was so much better.
The longer the song on a 45 the more narrow and compressed the grooves have to be so it
can physically fit on the tiny amount of space.
But that compromises the quality of the audio because its those grooves that determine how
the record sounds.
You’ll hear less bass and dynamic range on more compressed grooves.
Paul: You put four minutes, 4.5, five minutes, it tended to get smaller and be squashed.
The grooves were too squashed, the sound would be too squashed.
By 1973 a number of unconventional tracks
that blew up in New York City's discos crossed over to the billboard charts.
The success of Soul Makossa by Manu Dibango was single handedly propelled by its heavy
play at New York City clubs.
Atlantic records re-released the single in the US due to its popularity in New York City
and it made it on the Billboard charts.
Same thing happened with “Love Theme” arranged by Barry White.
It was a number one hit, a very rare feat for a fully instrumental track.
Nicky: We started playing it really heavy.
Siano: It made the charts before it ever was played on the radio.
And that's how we became more influential.
This 1974 Billboard article captures just how much influence DJs had on the music industry.
It says record labels were mixing records specifically for New York City clubs.
They were making those edits longer, and more importantly, they were bringing DJs in the
studio to pull it off.
But the dilemma with distribution remained: cut the song down for the radio, split it
across two sides, or squeeze the 5 plus minute remix on one side of the single, compromising
the quality of audio.
Almost by complete accident a disco producer came up with the solution:
12-inch single.
The man behind the discovery was Tom Moulton.
He had a remix of a song on tape, which he would typically then record onto a disposable
7-inch for reference.
Paul: But he didn't have any acetate that he could do that with, so he just put it on
a 12-inch acetate, which usually you would put 10 songs on.
Immediately he discovered that stretching one song across 12 inches dramatically changed
the sound of the record.
Paul: Because the grooves were wider spaced there would be more power and force.
He realized that this would create a more energetic and more lively sound.
In short, producers could dramatically stretch out the length of a single.
Which proved very handy for DJs.
Nicky: It was revolutionary.
You know, I was like "wow."
We can go to the bathroom.
We can go do drugs.
We can go, you know, smoke a joint.
Almost immediately 12-inch singles replaced 45s in clubs
But a debate erupted on whether or not they were worth the production cost to sell to
everyday consumers.
The success of “Ten Percent” by Double Exposure,
the first commercially available 12-inch single, proved its worth.
Though based on these singles it was still unclear what they were called.
Paul: Very quickly in the disco world, the 12 inches were turned into commercial
formats because there was a demand for them.
Those that like dancing to the 12 inch in the clubs wanted to be able to buy it.
And that’s exactly what happened with I Feel Love.
Paul: Very exciting, you know, because it sounded space age, it sounded other.
You know, the idea of setting up rhythm and repetition, and almost drone, if you like,
you could start to do that in a more exciting way using synthesizers and sequencers.
The song was originally the B-side of a 7-inch single.
By the end of 1977, it had been released in various forms,
finally finding its most iconic home on 12 inches of vinyl.
Paul: In many ways it gave a whole new lease of life to the idea of pop music
and it's that lease on life that really has kept pop music going to this day.
The 12-inch single ruled nearly every genre in the 1980s.
Not least because releasing a 7-inch version and 12-inch version of a track at precisely
the right time in a promotional cycle often kept popular songs on the charts for longer.
Paul: The record companies loved it because it gave them the opportunity to
sell more copies and keep the profile up.
But more importantly, the 12-inch single allowed for unfettered musical exploration.
Paul: The one that I fell in love with as soon as I heard it, and still love
it to this day wasn't really a remix as such at all it just existed in itself.
Which was Blue Monday.
Blue Monday by New Order is the most commercially successful 12-inch single of all time.
It was released in 1983 and was packaged in sleeve that looked like a floppy disk.
Paul: It's not a 7-inch turned into a 12.
It begins life as a 12-inch.
It's not a remix, that's the length that it was.
From 1970 through the 1980s the average length of #1 Pop songs nearly doubled and the 12-inch
single probably had a lot to do with it.
Paul: Any music that's made electronically and is made with a kind of experimental purpose, whether
that's in hip-hop or electronic music, its beginnings, in many ways, was the 12-inch remix.
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