This week Tony and I hit the floor! ‘Four on the floor’ refers to a rhythmic pattern in which the bass drum hits on every beat of a bar of 4, creating a steady pulse associated with disco, house, and much contemporary pop. Although now common across electronic and dance genres, the pattern has roots in earlier jazz, R&B, and Reggae. In tonight’s show we explored how four-on-the-floor rhythms appear across different decades and genres, from big-band swing to 21st-century dance music.
Benny Goodman & Donna Summer
Originally written and recorded by Louis Prima in 1936, Sing, Sing, Sing became most widely known through Benny Goodman’s 1937 recording. Prima is also known for voicing King Louie in Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967). Goodman recorded the piece in Hollywood with a large ensemble arranged by Jimmy Mundy, incorporating material from Chu Berry’s Christopher Columbus. Goodman’s recording features Gene Krupa on drums (who provides the ornamented four on the floor throughout), Harry James on trumpet, and Jess Stacy on piano. Unusualy for the time, Goodman’s recording is over eight minutes long, and takes up both sides of a 12-inch 78.
Released as the lead single from Donna Summer’s Bad Girls (1979), Hot Stuff was written by Pete Bellotte, Harold Faltermeyer, and Keith Forsey and produced by Bellotte and disco legend Giorgio Moroder. Hot Stuff combines disco with a more rock-oriented texture, and includes a guitar solo by Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. The track became Summer’s second No. 1 US hit and later won the inaugural Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. Moroder’s production at Munich’s Musicland Studios helped define late-1970s electronic disco, and the track directly influenced ABBA’s Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight), released later the same year.
Bob Marley & Modjo
Is This Love appeared on Bob Marley & The Wailers’ 1978 album Kaya, and reached No. 9 in the UK. The track exemplifies the group’s “steppers” rhythm, driven by Aston “Family Man” Barrett’s bass line and Carlton Barrett’s four-on-the-floor kick pattern (unusual for reggae), combined with a triplet-based hi-hat approach typical of their late-1970s sound. The music video, filmed at the Keskidee Arts Centre in London, features a young Naomi Campbell in one of her earliest screen appearances.
French duo Modjo – vocalist Yann Destagnol and producer Romain Tranchart – released Lady (Hear Me Tonight) as the lead single from their only studio album in 2001. The track prominently samples the guitar riff and harmonic sequence from Chic’s Soup for One (1982). Its commercial success included No. 1 placements across multiple European charts and entry into the Guinness Book of World Records as the first French group to debut at No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart. Since 2009, Chic have frequently incorporated a Lady/Soup for One mash-up into their live performances, reflecting the enduring association between the two recordings.
Clairo & Peggy Gou
Released as the third single from Clairo’s debut album Immunity (2019), Sofia was co-written and produced with Rostam Batmanglij. Harmonically, the progression (Dm7–G7–C–Fmaj7) mirrors the jazz-standard sequence from Autumn Leaves. The song explores Clairo’s early romantic attraction to women, referencing figures such as Sofía Vergara and Sofia Coppola. Featuring four-on-the-floor drumming from Danielle Haim, the track gained substantial attention through TikTok, becoming a sleeper hit that entered the Billboard Hot 100 nearly a year after release.
South Korean DJ and producer Peggy Gou released (It Goes Like) Nanana as the lead single of her 2024 debut album I Hear You. Gou is a classically trained pianist based in Berlin. The song contains elements of 1990s house music and samples ATB’s 9 PM (Till I Come) (1998). The track went viral on social media after footage from the Lost Nomads Festival spread online, contributing to its commercial rise. It debuted at No. 14 on the UK Singles Chart and marked Gou’s first official UK chart entry.
Rachmaninoff v Celine Dion
Our soundslike this week featured an interpolation between works composed 73 years apart! All By Myself, composed by Eric Carmen in 1975 and made famous by Celine Dion in 1996, interpolates the Adagio movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff‘s 2nd Piano Concerto in C minor (1901).
Four On The Floor Quiz
For our quiz this week, we played clips from famous four-on-the-floor songs – guess the artist and song!
As always, find the show and blog at joebennett.net/5live, with occasional Instagram extras at @joebennettmusicology. With a new show comes a new Spotify mega-playlist, which contains all songs featured on the show:
And you can still listen to our old mega-playlist here.
- Words: Joe Bennett, John Pierce O’Reilly
- Audio production: Joe Bennett, Rafi Waters
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