Donna Summer, Gone at 63 -- Workin' Hard No Longer

When it displaced, around 1978, rock music as the dominant dance club music -- one evening in the Quarter (New Orleans) of solid Stones in a club preceded the fall and made it all the harder -- disco became and remains a cultural cancer, turning pop music into lyrical drivel in mind-numbing 4/4 time. One exception: a very hot, exceptional artist, sometimes called the queen of the genre, Donna Summer. Cancer took her Thursday; we lost a great pop star.

From The Washington Post's online cover story on the evening of Thursday the 17th:

... In a 1984 assessment of her career, Times pop music critic Robert Palmer wrote that Ms. Summer “made some of the freshest, most substantial dance records of a period noted for its froth and foolishness." ...

In 1983, I was working hard at learning, for quite Machiavellian reasons, the importance of women in the modern worklplace. And there was Donna, giving us an anthem with She Works Hard for the Money that was all over the radio, in the US and Europe. It was one of the few great R&B songs to pierce the armor of the disco faux-label.

Thanks for everything, Donna. Rest in Peace.