In the two-family house where I grew up in Bensonhurst, the two musical acts I heard most often, blasting from stereos at the top and bottom of the house, were the Beatles and Donna Summer.

The former was more my parents' speed, although my teenaged cousins who lived downstairs played the Fab Four plenty, too. But for me, my sister and my cousins, Donna was omnipresent. More than a disco queen, Summer was a deity we could call our own, a Boston native who recorded with Italians, married a Brooklyn paesano and fronted a group called Brooklyn Dreams. With that powerful, breathy-to-guttural-to-rafter-shaking mezzo-soprano, she recorded music of both florid grandeur and hard precision, the very essence of urban life in the 1970s.

She was, in short, an honorary New Yorker. Which I imagine is how hundreds of born-and-bred New Yorkers unconsciously regard the news today of her untimely death at age 63 from (reportedly) lung cancer. Regardless of where her upbringing and musical training had taken her—a childhood and adolescence singing in churches in Dorchester, salad days in Germany in the musical Hair before she met her Berlin-based studio collaborator Giorgio Moroder—Donna, to the end, belonged to all of us: outerborough ethnics; Manhattan velvet-rope aesthetes (and those who pretended); the gay, black and Latino communities.

Of course, if you're reading this in Detroit or Las Vegas or Minneapolis or Atlanta or Los Angeles or London, Donna spoke to you, too. Considering her lifelong association with a communal, hedonistic pop-culture moment, it's remarkable when one plays back her oeuvre how intimate, almost solitary her great works really were. Call her the Wanderer, for her ability to stretch, adapt and transmogrify dance music until it embraced everyone and everything.

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Over the weekend SOTC pal Ann Powers wondered about what the music of Occupy Wall Street might be, and she discussed the drop-ins by the likes of Jeff Mangum and Talib Kweli as well as the music emanating from the park's current residents; she also mused on the "human microphone," the means by which sound is amplified in Zuccotti Park because the organizers don't have permits to run microphones. (It's a very incredible thing to watch, as you get to witness a crowd digest speeches that it's hearing line by line; there's more on it from Carl Wilson here.)

But there's another side to OWS's music too, although it's a small one. The ever-growing lending library—the leave-a-book-take-a-book shelf shown above; its catalog is online here—yesterday had a small clutch of records available for people, presumably those with battery-powered turntables at the ready, to listen to. The records weren't exactly political, but they were pretty solid. (The library's accepting donations via mail, for those of you who want to donate.) Four selections (which I think means about half the music offerings) below.

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