The 10 best Disco tracks of all time
Disco
Funk rebuilt for a room where the record never stops. A four-on-the-floor kick, strings, and an extended arrangement designed for a DJ rather than for radio — the first popular music written for the mix.
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Donna Summer / I Feel Love
Giorgio Moroder replaces the band with a Moog sequencer and Summer sings over the top as though nothing unusual is happening. Brian Eno called it the future, correctly, and it is still arriving.
MFSB / Love Is the Message
The house band of Philadelphia soul cut the record that became the closing ritual of the Paradise Garage. Not a song so much as a structure DJs spent a decade learning to use.
Chic / Good Times
Bernard Edwards plays the bassline that hip-hop, post-punk and pop all borrowed within eighteen months. Nile Rodgers leaves so much space in the guitar part that other people's records fit inside it.
Diana Ross / Love Hangover
Starts as a slow burn and doubles its tempo halfway through, which no pop single had any business doing. A Motown legend audibly enjoying the fact that the rules had changed.
Double Exposure / Ten Percent
Walter Gibbons's remix was the first commercially released twelve-inch single, and it invented the job. Everything a remixer does — extend, strip, delay the payoff — is already fully formed here.
First Choice / Doctor Love
Philadelphia grandeur with an unusually mean bassline. Chicago producers sampled it so relentlessly through the eighties that it functions as a founding text for house as much as for disco.
Loose Joints / Is It All Over My Face
Arthur Russell's downtown art project, rescued by a Larry Levan mix that turns a shambles into a groove. The record where disco stops being glossy and starts being strange, which is exactly where house picks it up.
Love Unlimited Orchestra / Love's Theme
An instrumental of wah-wah guitar and forty strings that went to number one in America. Barry White proved a dance record needed no vocal, no hook and no chorus — only an arrangement.
Thelma Houston / Don't Leave Me This Way
The greatest vocal performance in the genre, delivered against an arrangement that keeps withholding the release. Houston sounds like she is negotiating rather than pleading.
Labelle / Lady Marmalade
New Orleans funk, a Broadway-scale vocal and a lyric that got it banned in several places. Disco at its most confrontational, and a reminder that the genre's politics were never incidental to it.