"If there's a cure for this, I don't want it"
And that right there just about sums up this song. There are maybe two or three more lines, but there's not much more you need to know. That's because a feeling like this can't be described in words. It needs a pulsing, rising bassline. It needs hand claps and a fluttering hi-hat. It needs conga pats and a sparkling Rhodes. It needs breathy oooos and aaaahs. This is the song that seduced the world into the heady reverie of disco.
Mined and maligned a million times since then, disco is perhaps the most contentious genre of the last 50 years. Punk's estranged twin (that's right), it probably raised more ire than that stridently confrontational movement, and all within a pretext of innocent fun cloaked with references to indulgent debauchery. Yet at its heart was a message of communal love, the fruition of the polyamorous '60s finally freed of political baggage, a full embrace of the revolutionary power of ecstasy. It may have left people feeling deluded, but its originators managed to congeal the perverse thrill of seduction into an elemental rhythm. It was the best channeling of foreplay ever committed to music.
Almost 30 years later, The Concretes took this song as a starting point and turned it into the equally gorgeous "Diana Ross." A ceremonial opening swells into a wall of sound that mourns the ache your love hangover leaves behind. And yet through the wail, Victoria Bergsman can "feel no pain with Diana Ross, she leads the way to a love hangover." It's an affirmation that “Love Hangover” is still the soundtrack to flushed amour, forever reminding us of the kind of drunken giddiness that erases all memory of heartbreak, pain, and betrayal. Bask in it, because for a short while, it is the loveliest feeling in the world.
