The sacred pulse of queer disco
It erupts. Opening with a flicker of synth, You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) settles in your bones like a heartbeat you had not realized you needed. Published in 1978 in the golden and fevers of disco’s height, this was not only a club song. It was a proclamation. A liberation. Sylvester, clothed in sequins and blessed with a voice that could break chandeliers, did not seek room for the earth. His was a sparkling sermon with a BPM. He shaped it on the dance floor.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in a Pentecostal church, Sylvester James Jr. brought gospel to the mirrorball. Before his disco success, he blended, combined, and clashed gender, soul, and sexuality in San Francisco’s avant-garde drag group The Cockettes. You, however, crystallised everything. Backed by the heavenly Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes (later The Weather Girls), and the elegant production of Patrick Cowley, the song evolved into a manifesto. Of defiance via pleasure, not of resistance via aggression.
The song’s greatness stems from its intensity. It never slows down. The synths swirl, the bassline strums, and Sylvester’s falsetto cuts through like a laser crafted of silk. His voice is neither sly nor coded. It’s ecstatic, religious, wild. And it’s impossible to mimic. Every note he strikes resembles a body breaking free. From Marvin Gaye or Donna Summer to Sylvester, there is not a straight line. He was not a part of the chain. He was his own transformation.
The song is one of those surges of sustained, stylized energy that is disco’s great gift to pop music.
(Robert Christgau, Village Voice, 1978)
You Make Me Feel did not hide anything at a time when queer culture was still covert and frequently punished. It brightened the room. The song conquered the clubs, topped the Billboard Dance chart, and established a long presence in LGBTQ+ musical history. It set the scene for freedom long before the masses came around. And long after Sylvester died from AIDS-related problems in 1988, the song is still a hymn of selfhood and sensory force.
Underestimate You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) as a disco classic. It’s a spiritual experience clothed in silver lamé. It is what results from someone bravely being totally themselves and the globe, for just a split second, swaying along. Sylvester did not bow for the seasons. In his picture, the times glittered. And with this music, he still does.
