Fame is greedy. It devours people, skin and all. The documentary Donna Summer – Hot Stuff opens with scenes from a chat show in the 1980s. The host asks what the singer thinks of the cliches about her. ‘Disco diva?’ She just giggles: ‘Tss’. ‘Queen of sex?’ She sighs: ‘Urgh.’ Donna Summer rose to fame in the mid 1970s with her hits ‘Love To Love You Baby’ and ‘I Feel Love’, which feature her softly sung verses and sensual vocalizing over producer Giorgio Moroder’s futuristic Moog synthesizer beats. Fame followed her for the rest of her life. One critic from Time magazine reckoned that Summer simulated 22 orgasms on ‘Love To Love You’, while the record cover showed her in a nightdress. “I felt like a product,” said Summer later. “Like a bottle that someone had stuck a label on.” She did of course contribute to the product. One night, when the line ‘I love to love you’ came to her, she called Moroder. Directors Lucia Palacios and Dietmar Post conducted research for their fascinating film on both sides of the Atlantic. They spoke to the singer’s sister and brother and others who knew her well, like her former partner Peter Mühldorfer and the producer Harold Faltermeyer. Donna Summer’s voice appears frequently like a ghost, recorded during a phone call in November 2011. She says she is ‘good, great’. The interview arranged for the following summer never took place. In May 2012, at the age of 63, the singer died of lung cancer. Donna Summer’s career develops into a struggle for emancipation and control. She moves to LA to advance her success in America. Her album ‘Bad Girls’ is number one in the charts and in total she will sell over 130 million records. But according to Moroder, her label Casablanca Records is a ‘madhouse, piles of drugs, everyone was high at eleven in the morning’. Summer moves to the company newly founded by music mogul David Geffen, but she is soon dropped. ‘She Works Hard For The Money’ is another defiant hit for her. She later lives in Nashville and becomes a committed born-again Christian. Donna Summer deserves a place of honour in pop history’s hall of fame. The DJ and writer Hans Nieswandt rates ‘I Feel Love’ alongside ‘Autobahn’ by Kraftwerk as ‘the most modern song of the seventies’.
Der Tagesspiegel (Christian Schröder)