Bad Girls

The rhythm track alone could carry this song — a funky, syncopated pattern built on handclaps and a tight kick-snare that gives the whole thing a street-level swagger miles away from disco's more polished orchestral productions. There's a looseness to "Bad Girls" that feels almost rebellious within its own genre context, more influenced by funk and R&B than the Eurodisco sound Moroder had refined on their earlier collaborations. The electric guitar cuts through with real attitude, and the horn stabs punctuate the groove with a brassiness that's closer to soul music than the synthesizer-heavy productions of the era. Summer's vocal performance is theatrical in the best sense — she inhabits the characters she's describing rather than simply narrating, her voice dropping into a husky, conspiratorial register before opening up into something more declamatory. The lyric offers an unflinching portrait of women working the street, refusing both judgment and sentimentality, treating its subjects with a matter-of-fact dignity that was genuinely unusual in mainstream pop of the period. Culturally it arrived at a moment when disco was being aggressively pushed back against, and its refusal to be pretty or safe reads now as a kind of defiance. This is music for a warm city night, windows down, the street alive outside.