Disco keyboardist and New Jersey native Michael Zager's quirky 1978 hit "Let's All Chant" was a deft mix of disco, funk and baroque-pop, its relentless bassline and multiple hooks ("Ah-ah, eh-eh, let's all chant" and "Your body, my body, everybody work your body" among them) tailor made for the discotheques of the late '70s. But it's the song's breakdown that makes "Chant" so special: Just as the track works itself into an organ-fueled frenzy, the bottom drops out, leaving Afro-Cuban drums and a few lone disco caws to fill the void before gradually reprising the bass and handclaps and building to Zager's rollicking piano lines, garnished with an array of live wind instruments, including a trumpet solo that sounds like it's straight out of the Dynasty opening theme song. Sal Cinquemani


The production/songwriting team of James Mtume and Reggie Lucas was the Quincy to Stephanie Mills's Michael, the Jam & Lewis to her Janet, the Jermaine to her Usher. While they usually draped their muse in lush, live disco with strings so giant, "cinematic" wouldn't begin to describe them, 1979's "Put Your Body In It" didn't have time for such sentimentality—it was too busy predicting the future. Around live drums and polite strings swirl synths with the technology-for-technology's sake gusto and sound that fueled most of the black, post-Disco Sucks dance floor output of the early '80s. If the production verges on the robotic, Mills does anything but, bringing a nurturing vibe to standard here's-your-chance-now-dance lyrics. She coos, "I know you can get to it," with the warmth of a matriarch on this, the mother of boogie. Rich Juzwiak


Crystal Waters's thick-ankled house anthem takes the baton of social consciousness from the likes of Machine. And just as "There But For The Grace Of God Go I" makes its pungent point clear through its musical prickliness, "Gypsy Woman" sets its portrait of a crusty, haphazardly made-up bag lady begging dementedly on street corners to the Basement Boys's unforgivingly brutish, mongoloid thump. As Crystal's first-person protagonist stands there, singing for money, her lah-dah-dees are nearly buried in the brackish clatter, subtly expressing the heartbreaking fact that the plight of the homeless often falls on completely deaf (sometimes ringing) ears. Waters's astringent message was delivered to a club clientele that had become too pathologically petrified of breaking a sweat, canting a weave, or otherwise allowing themselves to get ugly to actually set foot on any dance floor not shaped like a fashion runway. Thus, Waters's class-conscious portrait of economic indifference serves as a working metaphor, equating "Sorry, I don't have any change on me" with the plastic fuckers who'd choose making the scene over tasting the rainbow. Eric Henderson


'80s Latin freestyle wasn't exactly known for its musicality. If you wanted to make a freestyle track in your papi's basement, all you had to do was score yourself a keyboard synthesizer, put your tone-deaf 14-year-old sister on a half-decent mic and, presto, you had an instant hit in New York and Miami. So what elevates Amoretto's "Clave Rocks" above such pop-crossover hits by Exposé, TKA and other more famous freestyle acts? Well, for one thing, the extended musical break on the Club Vocal mix, featuring Tito Puente on timbales, Latin salsa performer Luis "Perico" Ortiz on trumpet and Latin-pop producer Sergio George on piano. "Clave Rocks," co-produced by Rae Serrano (a producer on Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock album) and remixed by the Latin Rascals, was an ode to the Afro-Cuban "clave" rhythm and rivaled anything coming out of the Miami Sound Machine at the time. An obscure one-hit wonder from 1986, there hasn't been much ink spilt about Amoretto, which, organized by Serrano, allegedly featured a group of Latina vocalists who may or may not be the ones pictured on the single's sleeve and left behind a small legacy of unpaid royalties and disgruntled back-up singers. Sal Cinquemani


Donna Summer's cover of Jimmy Webb's "MacArthur Park" became the disco icon's first #1 crossover hit in 1978. Much of the credit goes to Webb, whose nostalgic, ornate lyrics paint a picture as vivid and elaborate as "Strawberry Fields": "Between the parted pages/We were pressed/In love's hot, fevered iron/Like a striped pair of pants…I remember the yellow cotton dress/Foaming like a wave/On the ground beneath your knees." The gorgeous, understated string-and-vocal intro of Summer's version—produced by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, of course—is faithful to Webb's poetry, at least in interpretation, before Moroder and Bellotte's elaborate disco arrangement and Summer's zealous vocals ("Someone left the cake out in the rain/I don't think that I can take it!/'Cause it took so long to bake it!/And I'll never have that recipe again!/Oh, no!") elevate the song to a whole new level of camp splendor. While the more popular edit spares us Jay Graydon's extended guitar solo (but also those glorious vocal echoes of the melody, not to mention the bridge), the full 17-minute "MacArthur Park Suite" includes the Summer/Moroder/Bellotte compositions "One Of A Kind" and "Heaven Knows," a duet with Brooklyn Dreams that went on to become a Top 5 hit in its own right, segued together in classic, over-the-top Moroder/Bellotte fashion. Sal Cinquemani


Maybe it's because of its perfect structural and allegorical design, but it was always this song that would soundtrack my exhausted bus ride home after a night of clubbing. Designed for our starved imaginations, if not exactly our dancing feet, this life-as-trance classic by brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll of Orbital used metronomic beats and a touched-by-an-angel vocal to approximate the calm and surrender of the insomnia drug prescribed to their mother. Like Halcion, it's a song that guides us gently into sleep but not before inducing a lucid connection to the beauty of our immediate, seemingly mundane modern surroundings. It's the oddest thing in the world: an eye-opening, sleep-inducing dance song. Ed Gonzalez


Behind-the-scenes peek at the making of Slant's dance list: Throughout this project’s painfully long gestation period, I frequently threw support to non-single album tracks over the canonized 12" classics, stunting for Michael Jackson's buttery "Baby Be Mine" over "Billie Jean" and (at my most quixotic) Paula Abdul's frenetic, Cherelle-lite "State Of Attraction" over "Straight Up." About the only instance where this rhetorical game of devils' advocate actually gained traction was in the case of this cover of Gary Wright's trip on the good starship MOR "My Love Is Alive." Chaka Khan's I Feel For You collaboration with celebrated electro producer John Robie (one of the men behind Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" and Jenny Burton's "Remember What You Like") is an admittedly opportunistic stratagem from Khan in her (successful) attempt to maintain her street cred. But it's also a completely harmonious confluence of ingredients that highlights the best of all worlds. Robie smashes Wright's pop-symphonic overtures into a jagged series of strokes that are neither verse, bridge, nor chorus. He chops and pushes Khan's raspy vocals back so far into the mix that they occasionally register as just another of his airy, buzzing synth lines, uniting the vocalist's famously adenoidal delivery with his fragmented musical vision in a way that was never possible with previous vocal collaborators who were never independently supple enough to withstand his drum pad artillery fire. Khan's performance here screams, "Damn the Linndrums, full speed ahead!" Eric Henderson


India couldn't get no sleep, dance listeners didn't want it, and "Little" Louie Vega and Kenny "Dope" Gonzalez (collectively, Masters at Work) didn't have time for it. Since joining forces in the early '90s as a DJ and production duo, Masters at Work have relentlessly turned New York house into the melting pot (or, if you prefer, salad bowl) it should be. Out-discoing disco (their remake of Loleatta Holloway's "Runaway," again with India on the mic, insistently surpassed the original), bumping samba house, programming sample house, and leading full-band blow-out house, you get the feeling that these masters never really stop working. 1993's "I Can't Get No Sleep" represents them at their best and most individual sound—post-Chicago deep house—with its frigid, minor melody melted by a wannabe church organ. Or maybe it's just that love making it weak. Rich Juzwiak


Blondie turned more than a few punk purist heads with their first #1 hit "Heart Of Glass." Originally born out of the New York punk scene of the mid-1970s, the band made a surprising shift toward more pop-oriented material on their third album Parallel Lines. With its swirling synths and Chic-like guitar riffs radiating off a drum machine beat and singer Deborah Harry's sweet, honey-dipped vocal, the song about fragile love helped lift new wave from the underground and into the mainstream, marrying it with the sounds of the then-booming disco movement. Harry's layered, airy vocals were a contrast to her usually deeper, more punk-rooted brass, while the track's languorous instrumental ending emulated the disco formula Giorgio Moroder was perfecting at the time. One can only imagine what Moroder could have done with the track, but the fact is that he probably wouldn't have changed a single thing. Coincidentally—or, perhaps, not so coincidentally—Harry collaborated with the German disco maven the following year on "Call Me," the theme from the film American Gigolo, which would become the band's second chart-topper. Sal Cinquemani


"Show Me Love" was not just one of the biggest house-pop crossovers of the early-'90s club-radio boom, it was also one of the last. At least radio house went out with its face on (that is, before it came back in its more Euro varieties). 1993's "Show Me Love" was as representative as any track of the way house distilled disco's flamboyant, strings-and-all yearning into a minimal thump with skeletal keyboards doing the bulk of melodic support (as defined by Swedish producer Stonebridge's remix). Not that Miss Robin needed it with her post-LaBelle (and, really, post-Peniston) grunts and caterwauling. Her devotion to dance music ran deep—she was willing to get ugly for it. Rich Juzwiak