Diana! (Original TV Soundtrack)

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When Diana Ross approached Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards to write her 1980 album, <i>Diana</i>, she had a simple goal: to have fun. She was in her mid-thirtie, already a legend. Rodgers and Edwards had enjoyed a string of hits with Chic—whose 1979 release <i>Risqué</i> was a major album—and as the musical backbone of Sister Sledge (“We Are Family,” “He’s the Greatest Dancer”). But for as polished as they were—how subtly they managed to aggregate the rhythmic grittiness of funk into the Black bourgeois professionalism of Ross’ Motown—they were also playful in ways that never felt cartoonish or put-on. Sophisticated, ye. But also fun. For as well-known as the music is—“Upside Down” was Ross’ first No. 1 single in four year, and “I’m Coming Out” is arguably her best-known song—<i>Diana</i> didn’t have an easy birth. The cultural backlash to disco had come to a head less than a year earlier, when about 50,000 people showed up at a baseball stadium in Chicago to destroy disco albums in an event that devolved into a riot. They claimed to hate the music, but given how Black and gay it wa, you wonder if it wasn’t something else. (And given how bloated and indistinct corporate rock had gotten by the late 1970, you wonder if that same something had prevented them from hearing Chic as one of the most rhythmically interesting guitar-based bands outside punk at the time.) .

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