Donna Summer

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 p... More >

You tend to suspect anyone who releases three double-LPs in eighteen months of delusions of Chicago, but Donna is here to stay and this is her best album. The first two sides, four songs per, never let up--the voice breaks and the guitars moan over a bass-drum thump in what amounts to empty-headed girl-group rock and roll brought cannily up-to-date. Moroder makes his Europercussion play on side four, which is nice too, but side three drags, suggesting that the rock and roll that surfaces here is perhaps only a stop along the way to a totally bleh total performance. Me, I still love my Marvelettes records. (Grade: A-)