Last Dance for Love; Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” The era of Disco, largely taking place between the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, spawned a plethora of upbeat (and often repetitive) music that attracted, and in some cases offended, a wide variety of audiences. Disco was primarily popular with women, gay men, and African Americans, although with the premiere of Saturday Night Fever in 1977, disco attracted the demographic disco it had previously provoked: white, heterosexual men. Soon after, “Disco Fever became "last year's fad"... and by 1980 it was proclaimed to be dead” (Powers). In 1978, at the peak of the Disco era, Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” from the 1978 film Thank God It’s Friday was released to the public; the song was an instant…show more content… According to author Alice Echols, “disco foregrounded female desire to a far greater extent than rock music” (Echols, 79). Echol’s later mentions that disco “gave voice to women’s lust” and even mentions Donna Summer’s orgasmic “Love to Love You Baby” as a song clearly about pleasuring a woman. Although “Last Dance” is not as overtly sexual as “Love to Love You Baby”, one could interpret the song as describing a woman’s last chance to find someone to go home with before the night is over, as mentioned previously. Summer sings “‘cause when I’m bad / I’m so, so bad”, which nods to the sexual activities depicted in “Love to Love You Baby”. Similar to most disco songs, “Last Dance” incorporates instruments such as violins, pianos, horns, drums, and a bass guitar that incorporates a funky bassline that is typically found in most disco music. The song also includes a flute in the song’s intro. The beginning of the song is slower while Summer performs something similar to a ballad before transitioning to a beat that is meant for dancing. “Last Dance” includes an orchestral sound found in many disco tracks; this sound was produced by string instruments and horns like those of a classical
