Shuggie Otis (“Island Letter”) soon followed with their own “sophisticated” and trippy-tropical takes on the primitive drum machine groove. Strangely, though, the drum machine was used on these records precisely because it didn’t reproduce the uniform sound of a conveyor belt (heck, you could get Ringo Starr to do that). Instead, it sounded exotic, otherworldly, inebriated.
It wouldn’t be until the dawn of Eurodisco in the mid-1970s that the drum machine would live up to its name. Thanks to the Common Market, broadly similar social democratic governments, and the onslaught of the American pop culture machine, the distinct national identities of Europe began to dissolve after World War II. The lingua franca of this new pan-European identity became a combination of the deracinated Motown stomp beat first developed in the north of England, the sunny cod-Latino holiday music first developed by Titanic and Barrabas, and the bubblegum music started in the United States by Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz as an antidote to the “serious” rock music of hippiedom. Europop was relentlessly chipper, hyperstylized music that reflected the boundless optimism of a European union that would end all continental wars, the homogenized blandness of a culture run by bureaucrats, and the retreat into safety of a continent that was reeling from terrorist organizations like the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigade. It was lowest-common-denominator music, and its message could be understood by anyone, even if you had to wade through swamps of bad diction and even worse syntax to get there. It was a kind of musical Esperanto—designed for everyone yet seemingly loved by no one (at least in public). Europoppers hardly needed the drum machine to make their rhythms more metronomic (check the Equals’ early Europop classics “Baby, Come Back” and “Viva Bobby Joe” for proof), but when Eurodisco producers discovered the drum machine, the nightmare vision of a unified Europe was realized: The Germans were the drummers, the Belgians were the bassists, the Swedes were the singers, the French and the Italians were the producers, and everyone but the British wrote the English-language lyrics.
When the rhythm box fell into the hands of producers in Munich and Düsseldorf, it became the stern taskmaster it was always designed to be—“a regulator to tighten the pulse,” 7 as journalist David Toop called it, and any derivation from a strictly regimented 4/4 was absolutely forbidden. Academic Walter Hughes has called disco “a form of discipline” in which, along with body building and safe sex, gay men turned the practices of regulation into acts imbued with eroticism. Hughes writes that disco “takes the regular tattoo of the military march and puts it to the sensual purposes of dance music.” 8 Of course, as we have seen, this had happened in popular music all along, but with its own self-awareness, insistence on the 4/4 beat, and the development of the synthesizer and the drum machine, disco explicitly played on this aspect, perhaps never more obviously than on Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.”
Little more than Donna Summer simulating an orgasm or twenty over a background of blaxploitation cymbals, wah-wah guitars, a funky-butt clavinet riff, some synth chimes, and what could be the most lifeless drums ever recorded (courtesy of a Wurlitzer Side Man), “Love to Love You Baby” was the aural parallel of the newly respectable porn industry. Even without Summer’s moans and heavy breathing, this would have been the case. Thanks to a thousand terrible love scenes in blaxploitation flicks, that wink-wink-nudge-nudge guitar riff had become permanently associated with a couple getting down in a wood-paneled room with leopard-skin throws and astrological bric-a-brac, while the piercing synth fills represented the more “spiritual” side of fornication. But it was that bloodless jackhammer beat that really screamed Debbie
It wouldn’t be until the dawn of Eurodisco in the mid-1970s that the drum machine would live up to its name. Thanks to the Common Market, broadly similar social democratic governments, and the onslaught of the American pop culture machine, the distinct national identities of Europe began to dissolve after World War II. The lingua franca of this new pan-European identity became a combination of the deracinated Motown stomp beat first developed in the north of England, the sunny cod-Latino holiday music first developed by Titanic and Barrabas, and the bubblegum music started in the United States by Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz as an antidote to the “serious” rock music of hippiedom. Europop was relentlessly chipper, hyperstylized music that reflected the boundless optimism of a European union that would end all continental wars, the homogenized blandness of a culture run by bureaucrats, and the retreat into safety of a continent that was reeling from terrorist organizations like the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigade. It was lowest-common-denominator music, and its message could be understood by anyone, even if you had to wade through swamps of bad diction and even worse syntax to get there. It was a kind of musical Esperanto—designed for everyone yet seemingly loved by no one (at least in public). Europoppers hardly needed the drum machine to make their rhythms more metronomic (check the Equals’ early Europop classics “Baby, Come Back” and “Viva Bobby Joe” for proof), but when Eurodisco producers discovered the drum machine, the nightmare vision of a unified Europe was realized: The Germans were the drummers, the Belgians were the bassists, the Swedes were the singers, the French and the Italians were the producers, and everyone but the British wrote the English-language lyrics.
When the rhythm box fell into the hands of producers in Munich and Düsseldorf, it became the stern taskmaster it was always designed to be—“a regulator to tighten the pulse,” 7 as journalist David Toop called it, and any derivation from a strictly regimented 4/4 was absolutely forbidden. Academic Walter Hughes has called disco “a form of discipline” in which, along with body building and safe sex, gay men turned the practices of regulation into acts imbued with eroticism. Hughes writes that disco “takes the regular tattoo of the military march and puts it to the sensual purposes of dance music.” 8 Of course, as we have seen, this had happened in popular music all along, but with its own self-awareness, insistence on the 4/4 beat, and the development of the synthesizer and the drum machine, disco explicitly played on this aspect, perhaps never more obviously than on Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.”
Little more than Donna Summer simulating an orgasm or twenty over a background of blaxploitation cymbals, wah-wah guitars, a funky-butt clavinet riff, some synth chimes, and what could be the most lifeless drums ever recorded (courtesy of a Wurlitzer Side Man), “Love to Love You Baby” was the aural parallel of the newly respectable porn industry. Even without Summer’s moans and heavy breathing, this would have been the case. Thanks to a thousand terrible love scenes in blaxploitation flicks, that wink-wink-nudge-nudge guitar riff had become permanently associated with a couple getting down in a wood-paneled room with leopard-skin throws and astrological bric-a-brac, while the piercing synth fills represented the more “spiritual” side of fornication. But it was that bloodless jackhammer beat that really screamed Debbie