The Emotions' Flowers

A fabulous song from the '70s that was one of the first products of The Emotions' alliance with Maurice White and the rest of the EWF crew. In the disco era that followed, The Emotions became an alternative, female front end for EWF, much as Sister Sledge often did for Chic, and Samantha Sang and Yvonne Elliman, and, ahem, Andy Gibb did for The Bee Gees.

People who want to run down the disco era often focus on one-hit-wonders (i.e., to emphasize the period's insubstantiality or ephemerality say) rather than on this sort of multiple hit-factory substructure of the time, where each of the productions centers were strongly continuous with other, usually more well-established music genres such as soul and funk (think of Quincy Jones and Gamble and Huff as other centers in this regard) and electronic music (in Moroder's case). Disco was no accident. It 'had to happen' just as much as punk did. Talent and ambition had piled up in strange corners of the industry and was ready to spill over by 1978. And it did.