The Queen of Disco Edition Part 1 (Encore)

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History,

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2026

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Donna Summer was a hit-maker for two decades and a dance floor deity for more than three. Her collaborations with Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte were formative in dance, electronic, and rock music, influencing everyone from David Bowie and Blondie to Madonna and Moby. But the rock establishment was stinting in its appreciation—whether at Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1979 or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the 2000s.

In this encore episode from 2017, Chris Molanphy examines how Summer became the queen of disco … and then transcended that role altogether.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate and Panoply, about the hits from coast to coast.
0:17.1	I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series?
0:23.6	On today's show, if I asked you to name the first artist to top the Billboard album chart with three consecutive double albums, who would you guess?
0:33.8	Probably Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd, right? Try again again maybe the beetles they had just one double album
0:41.3	when they were together and several chart-topping double lp compilations after they split up but they
0:47.2	weren't first or maybe all those rappers who released two cd sets in the 90s tupac has had several top the charts, but never three in a row, and never while he was alive.
0:59.4	So, which badass dude pulled off this trifecta of double album chart crushers?
1:05.5	Actually, it wasn't a dude at all, but she was a badass.
1:09.7	Sad girl. a dude at all, but she was a badass.
1:33.0	Donna Summer has been called the Queen of Disco, and that name is both totally correct and somewhat limiting.
1:40.6	It's correct because no female recording artist commanded the charts during disco's late 70s height than Donna Summer.
1:46.3	Among solo acts, she might well be the king of disco too. And there's no longer any shame in being attached to Disco. Four decades after the music's peak, Disco has proved
1:52.2	its resiliency as a musical form. The term Queen of Disco is limiting, however, because
1:58.5	Summer's roots are in rock, soul, and Europop, and her hit-making career outlasted, however, because Summer's roots are in rock, soul, and Europop,
2:01.9	and her hit-making career
2:03.4	outlasted, however fitfully,
2:05.9	disco's infamous implosion
2:07.5	in the early 80s.
2:10.1	She was hard for money,
2:13.5	so hard for you, honey.
2:17.1	She was hard for the money, so you better treat her right. But even
2:24.3	But even accounting for the
	...

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