69 of the Best Disco Songs of All Time, for Pride

Forty-five years later, this Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder/Pete Bellotte collab still sounds like the future.

The tempo on this song subtly speeds up and slows down—a huge no-no in dance music, which requires a metronomic precision for proper beat-matching. But that’s nicely thematic, as “Mighty Real” transgresses right along with its singer, who once responded to Joan Rivers’s interview question, “Are you a drag queen?,” with, “I’m Sylvester.”

The absolute height of elegance. This song is like caviar injected with good coke.

No other song fucks as hard or with such class.

Those strings are practically begging to go over the top, but Mills’s heartfelt chirp keeps it all grounded. The Mills/James Mtume/Reggie Lucas trifecta is up there with the great longterm collaborations of all time, like Janet Jackson/Jimmy Jam/Terry Lewis and the aforementioned Summer/Moroder/Bellote.

The peaks, valleys, and thrusts make this as much a rollercoaster as a song.

I’m sure this song made loads of sense prior to its inclusion in Paris Is Burning, but after it’s a veritable credo.

If disco died at 1979's Disco Demolition night, then the kind of sparser and shinier take on the genre that dominated Black radio in the early ‘80s was clearly from heaven. Songwriter/arranger Kashif outfitted this one with the wiggly analog synths that were its signature earworms.

An early example of what would come to be known as a drop can be heard in this 1981 masterpiece by the San Francisco based pioneer of the hi-NRG disco subgenre, Patrick Cowley. In this context, though, it’s orgasmic.

Tell me you want to fuck without telling me you want to fuck.

A softer, less driving take on disco—it feels like Bridges is aspiring alongside its listeners in their living rooms and cars.

Practically every Italo disco fan will tell you a different song that epitomizes the European, highly synthesized genre. Here’s mine.

Uncancellable.

Somehow sweeter and more serious than “Stayin’ Alive.” Disco was a Black and queer genre, and I’m sure it was frustrating when white dudes from the UK became the faces of disco in the mainstream media. But a banger is a banger.

“Heart of Glass” was kind of a joke (its hummed bridge is in 7/4, reportedly to throw dancers off). American Gigolo’s “Call Me” was no joke! (If I were a braver man, “Atomic” would be here instead.)

This song is so much more than yet another thing to gay up A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, but it’s also very that.

The original version told the story of evolution gone awry by human meddling a good decade and a half before Jurassic Park. But the pumped-up instrumental riff accompanied by an eye-popping one-take ensemble dance number in Gaspar Noé’s 2018 movie Climax is so indelible as to be definitive.

In 1976, porn performer Andrea True recorded a commercial in Jamaica but couldn’t take the money she earned home to the US as a result of government sanctions. So she recorded “More More More” there and took that home, and then around the world, thereby getting paid and then some. Thank you, bureaucracy!

Wild to think that at one point Madonna was just another anonymous disco artist, joyfully upholding the status quo.

“Jump to It” songwriter/producer Luther Vandross on the making of the song in David Ritz’s 2014 Aretha Franklin biography, Respect:

I wanted to establish the groove with a long instrumental intro. Aretha didn’t think the listener would wait that long to hear her voice. I assured her that the listener would be hooked on the groove and would be delighted to wait. She wanted to come in sooner. I said no. ‘Who’s the one with the most hits here?’ she asked. Of course the answer was her. I just had one; she had dozens. ‘But who’s the one with the latest hit?’ I asked. She didn’t answer. She stormed out.

But then, luckily for us all, she came back.

“Is that enough love?” asks vocal maximalist Teena Marie in the extended version of this song. Honestly, there’s room for even more.

Never stops ascending.

Arguably the biggest Italo song of all time in the U.S., thanks to the sampling of its bass line in Tag Team’s “Whoomp! (There It Is).”

Sly and Robbie give Gwen Guthrie a dubbed out slice of seventh heaven, and legendary DJ producer Larry Levan slams it home. I like to imagine myself taking this home from a record shop in 1983, smoking a joint, and feeling my head explode while listening to it for the first time.

“It’s a pleasure when you treasure all that’s new and true and gay,” sings Luther Vandross in this song that finally made it to No. 1 in 2001 thanks to its rather heavy sampling in Janet Jackson’s “All for You.”

Phyllis Hyman didn’t sing a ton of happy songs, which is a shame because despite a tragic life, she made this Mtume/Lucas collaboration sound so convincing.

If he never accomplished anything else, Prince still could have gotten to say that he wrote and performed “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” Top that!

This technically sports an electro beat, but this is nonetheless an Italo staple, and no sensible disco fan would be without it.

Drama!

Larry Levan famously played this for the first time in the Paradise Garage to a frosty reception. So he played it again. And again. And again. By the end people were lying on the floor, kicking their feet.

Nobody grooved like Kool & the Gang.

It seems almost unfair to say that the Village People abandoned camp with this earnest depiction of gay migration to San Francisco (I mean, they were still in their archetype costumes), but this one is pure soul. The Pet Shop Boys understood and cultivated its poignancy in their 1993 cover.

More class from Chic!

How D-Train managed stadium-sized sound in 1982 with this funk stormer is beyond me.

Truly a seminal track that may come off today as relatively toothless but basically inspired the very genre we’re examining.

Everything about this, but especially the bridge.

Do androids dream of lit-up dance floors?

Not the best known Chaka Khan/Nick Ashford/Valerie Simpson collaboration (that would be “I’m Every Woman”), but for my money, the best.

Kenton Nix, who wrote Taana Gardner’s “Heartbeat,” also wrote this, and you can tell. That’s not a knock though. If you write a song so good, you might as well write it again.

The ultimate in backyard barbecue jams.

A genre-defining classic that has lost a lot of its pop via its ubiquity. Now it’s cultural wallpaper. Ingenious all the same.

The way this one just strolls.

In the ‘90s, not one but two hits sampled “Forget Me Nots”—Will Smith’s “Men in Black” and George Michael’s “Fastlove”—to help us to remember.

Robots jam to this.

A key example of what has been called “proto-house.” Without this Levan production, who knows how things would have turned out for us?

That wild key change in the pre-chorus bridge!

Rollerskates for the ears.

An Italo classic hailing from...Canada.

When someone playing a bass that busy tells you to get up on the floor ‘cause we’re gonna boogie oogie oogie till you just can’t boogie no more, you listen.

Yeah, the rapping is hokey (there’s a dub that mostly does away with the vocals that’s much cooler), but Divine is divine, and the track itself is way, way ahead of its time. It practically predicted the hyper dancey industrial-adjacent subgenre of the late ‘80s called EBM.

A song, a genre, a lifestyle.

This song glides on air.

Not widely considered disco, but that bass line and the emphasized kick on this pumped-up remix by John “Jellybean” Benitez makes it so.

The chorus is: “Push push in the bush,” OK?

Another one of those foundational tracks whose inclusion may seem mundane, but only because it predicted so much that it rendered itself part of the scenery in retrospect.

Hardly the weirdest Italo song, but it’s certainly a weird one.

Because psychedelia is far too rare in these parts.

This is so heartfelt I already regret not putting it up higher.

An Italo production that sounds like it was made in some New York basement studio alongside rats. I once heard this at a club with a primo sound system and I swear the walls were vibrating.

And then what’d he do?

A real come-to-Jesus moment.

Singular in its cattiness.

It’s caked in the reverb and hum of electronics, but Redd’s joy is entirely human.

This is one of those tracks sung by a woman that seems to be written from the point of view of a gay man (see also: Inner Life’s “I’m Caught Up (In a One Night Love Affair”)—or at least it speaks directly to the experience as it was and has since resumed being.

Another Italo classic—and this one has a rap!

This isn’t just about the smoothness of the groove, or the lusciousness of Howard Hewett’s and Jody Watley’s voices. It’s about the sprong-y “boing” sound that punctuates throughout.

Disco Fizz, Azoto’s entire mini-album that is home to “San Salvador,” is about as eccentric as it gets—vibrating with arpeggios and teeming with high-pitched vocals that imagine the Bee Gees on helium. It’s a disco fever dream, but you can dance to it.

Because this list would be inept without acknowledging the genius of Leroy Burgess. (Fun fact: SOPHIE was a fan.)

Out of all the Johnny-come-lately rockers who attempted to cash in on the disco craze of the ‘70s, no one did it better than the Stones! Big shock!