#10: Stayin' Alive55 Points (On 3 of 19 lists)Highest Placement: #4 by Smoky<![CDATA[<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/u1qN6gLbUMw?version=3&amp;hl=en_US" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/u1qN6gLbUMw?version=3&amp;hl=en_US</a>]]> Featured In: Saturday Night Fever (also
Airplane, according to Compound)
Composer/Lyricist: Barry, Robin & Maurice Gibb
Performer: Bee Gees
Description:Saturday Night Fever is a 1977 American dance film directed by John Badham and starring John Travolta as Tony Manero, an immature young man whose weekends are spent visiting a local Brooklyn discothèque; Karen Lynn Gorney as his dance partner and eventual friend; and Donna Pescow as Tony's former dance partner and would-be girlfriend. While in the disco, Tony is the king. His care-free youth and weekend dancing help him to temporarily forget the reality of his life: a dead end job, clashes with his unsupportive and squabbling parents, racial tensions in the local community, and his associations with a gang of macho friends.
"Stayin' Alive" is a disco song by the group Bee Gees from the
Saturday Night Fever motion picture soundtrack. The song was written by the Bee Gees (Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb) and produced by the Bee Gees, Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson. It was released on December 13, 1977 as the second single from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. It is one of their signature songs.
Upon release, "Stayin' Alive" climbed the charts to hit the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 the week of February 4, 1978, remaining there for four weeks. In the process, it became one of the band's most recognizable tunes, in part because of its place at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever.
The executive producer of the soundtrack, Robert Stigwood (who was also the Bee Gees' manager) called them up and asked them to write a few songs for a soundtrack to a film he was planning. At this point, the film was in early stages and it did not have a title yet; in fact, all Stigwood had to go on was a New York cover story about discomania. They wrote "Stayin' Alive" over the course of a few days while sprawled on the staircase at the Château d'Hérouville studio in Paris. A majority of the soundtrack was recorded in France for tax reasons.
Due to the death of drummer Dennis Byron's mother in the middle of the song's sessions, the group first looked for a replacement. The shortage of qualified drummers in this area of France prompted the group to try a drum machine—yet it did not offer satisfactory results. After listening to the drum track of the already-recorded "Night Fever", the group and producer Albhy Galuten selected two bars from that track, re-recorded them as a recurrent loop on a separate tape, and proceeded with sessions for "Stayin' Alive". This accounts for the unchanging rhythm throughout the song.
RSO Records wanted the song to share the then-title of the film, "Saturday Night", but the Bee Gees refused a title change, insisting that there had been too many songs with "Saturday" in the title, and the album already had a song with the word "night" in the title—"Night Fever". Rather than change the name of the former song to match the film, Stigwood expanded the name of the film to encompass the title of the latter song.
Over the years, the brothers have had mixed feelings about the song. On one hand, they admit it brought them tremendous fame; on the other, it led to their being pigeonholed as a disco act, despite a long and varied career before and after.
As for the message of the song, Robin Gibb was quoted as saying, "'Stayin' Alive' is about survival in the big city—any big city—but especially New York."
Along with the success of the movie, the soundtrack, composed and performed primarily by the Bee Gees, was the best-selling soundtrack album of all time (it was later surpassed by Whitney Houston's soundtrack to The Bodyguard).
Topic: LoC #63: Top 50 Songs from Movies (Read 59744 times)
