Zane: ‘I Feel Love’ – the reworking of a classic!

In the late seventies disco was ramping up to its nadir of glitz, glam, cocaine and indulgence. One of Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s collaborations ‘Love To Love You Baby’ had already avoided being the commercially targeted drivel churned out post-Saturday Night Fever. But, if Moroder had already proven himself a hit-maker with that song, what he did with its follow-up, ‘I Feel Love’, was a whole new level. What sounded like the future with this song in 1977 is still timeless in 2017.

‘I Feel Love’ has never gone out of fashion. It breathes rarefied air atop the electronic dance music heap of classic tracks. It might not be the best-ever disco track, but it brought the idea of music with a mechanic heart to the world’s attention.

By swapping sumptuous orchestral arrangements for hard-edged, computer-programmed efficiency, Moroder and fellow producer Pete Bellotte took the futurism of Kraftwerk and made it danceable.

The four to the floor thud, the repetitive building of tension to ecstatic release, the tightly sequenced basslines, the layered arrangement, and then the multiple mixes gave dance music a new blueprint. That was all a multimedia creative like Zane needed to build his own rock-inspired version upon.

Essentially Zane doesn’t make any drastic changes to the core arrangement. And how could he? There’s no need to fix something that ain’t broke! So the embellishments mainly regard the added layers of crunchy guitar riffs and hooks, as well as the percussion which is busier and hits harder.

And of course, the obvious vocals, which now take on a whole different point of view, as to who is feeling the love. Zane’s macho-like “I Feel Love” is infused with tons of rocking testosterone, hence the arrangement is more angsty and urgent, as opposed to Summer’s breezy and wistful whispering.

In an interview, sometime during 1978, Brian Eno prophesized that the music of the future would pair a hard, rigid electronic sound, with its exact opposite. Guess what Brian…Zane and “I Feel Love” just happened!

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