Can we just take a second to drill down on the fact that Chic bestowed the seeds upon not one but two genres that have gone on to dominate 21st century music, financially and culturally? “Good Times” gave paved, widened roads for hip-hop to evolve with. Then next with “Everybody Dance”—its piano lines, wicked bassline from Bernard Edwards, major-minor-major chord changes, proclamation lyrics from Norma Jean Wright on lead vocals, and Luther Vandross, Diva Gray, Robin Clark, and David Lasley on background vocals—became a lodestar to the modern house music era, which would elongate itself into many forms of electronic music in our troubled 21st century.
Chic, consisting of guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards—who as the Chic Organization wrote, produced and resurrected careers and built Chic—and inspired by watching Roxy Music live in performance, saw past disco but worked insane type magic within the genre. The template, that indentation of a 4/4 beat with lyrical references to the ’30s and ’40s, massive basswork from Edwards (call him the Ron Carter of disco, cause he was), remained ingrained in so many minds and imaginations that Madonna, Duran Duran, Debbie Harry, Carly Simon and David Bowie hit mainstream undeniability with production from Nile Rodgers. The “fab five” double D were so enamored with Chic’s legacy that members John Taylor and Andy Taylor of the fashionable Duran Duran would form a group with Chic’s drummer and British vocalist “Mr. Suave,” Bob from Batley, Robert Palmer, called The Power Station. Which was produced by, well, who else, Bernard Edwards, with some informal assistance from Nile Rodgers.
So much gloss from the hive mind of these master musicians and arrangers, a hustle R&B music aesthetic—they succinctly encapsulate the vastness, the number one operative for outrunning the blues. Dancin’.
Let me talk to you about swag. “Good Times” is the first song you hear on their third studio album, Risqué, and it’s a burner, thinker, groover, and innovator. It’s like Nile and Bernard said, off the top, “deal with this.” Studio 54 got the fame; actually, “Le Freak” was born out of Nile Rodgers and a host of other Black people being denied entrance to the club. But we’re not here for that. Chic always knew there was power in the music; disco brought all types of folks together. And if you follow history, when the underrepresented folks, shall we say, band together, those in power get shook. Why, you may ask? Larry Levan at his Paradise Garage—where Frankie Crocker, DJ and Music Director of WBLS in New York, the largest Black-owned radio station on the globe during the late ’70s and entire ’80s, was literally begging, every damn night, for Levan’s documented set—song and artist, in the exact order it was played, so he could run it back over the airwaves the next day and sell some damn records—wasn’t a fluke.
Those curated DJ sets that sometimes went until 6 a.m. were tested by the most critical dancers, thinkers, musicians, and talented New Yorkers you could find. These above-average music heads—who were Black, Brown, Asian, gay, straight, trans, and Caucasian folk—rearranged the dance floor into a euphoric basement nightly. This community of leftist alliances, not Studio 54 celebrities, who were seeking refuge from the encroaching Reagan conservatism, habitually got nourished by the reformist thwack.
So that compiling of ideas for “Good Times” builds on top of one another: guitar picking and strumming, hand claps, those declarative chorus lines, a restrained piano line, saccharine sweet strings wafting in the backroom, and the punchy, dutting bassline that should be paying rent in your brain because it’s always there. These elements involved in building this song structure, with references to high society and a “who cares about reality” mindset reminiscent of The Great Gatsby, all swell into the break. Rodgers and Edwards drew inspiration from their experiences in dance clubs, where they observed that “the break,” where everything in a song is stripped away, and you just have drums and bass, made dance floors explode, and dancers push their creativity. They incorporated this technique and then gradually reintroduced the various elements, rebuilding the full song piece by piece. This level of innovation was a feature, not a bug, on display in the first song; Chic Organization knew very well the uptick of calculated sequencing.
The title Risqué slightly teases the idea of something taboo. “My Forbidden Lover,” with its tale of wanting something that you should not have, with, again, those anthemic refrain song lines and the perfect marriage of Nile Rodgers giving that picking, strumming color on guitar, just floating above that workmanlike bass foundation. Here we get Edwards a couple times giving us his own characteristic riffs amidst this short, major chord laden, easy-to-understand scenario. Is it cultural, racial, or something else? Didn’t matter. This track played it succinctly, funky and easy to understand: “I don’t want no other.”
But Risqué actually worked to identify a slow but steady turn the public had on disco, and most definitely the demographic who flocked to it. Just two weeks before the release of Chic’s third album, Disco Demolition Night happened at Chicago’s Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979. The devastating, infamous promotional event, attended by 47,495, was squeezed in between a Chicago White Sox doubleheader where rock DJ Steve Dahl asked fans to bring a disco record to the ballpark in exchange for 98-cent admission, and those LPs were to be gathered and then blown up in a controlled explosion between games. What became known recently, due to the 2023 PBS American Experience documentary, The War on Disco, which examined the cultural backlash, is that it wasn’t just disco records being exploded—it was Black music in general.
Yet the first Michael Jackson solo record, Off The Wall, released on August 10, 1979, produced by Quincy Jones, marked a major shift into accessible dance music; MJ and QJ not only blended disco, pop, and R&B, but they also modeled previous Jacksons’ anthemic tracks “Blame It On The Boogie” and “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” to build a new pop star. A version of disco, soon to be renamed boogie, that was sheeny, slick. Devoid of the sweat equity put in by those “critical dancers” of all shades and persuasions. MJ made this so-called “Black music” uncomplicated, no thwack, to enjoy without having to associate where and whom it came from.
So that infamous “darkness” seeps from every inch of Risqué, that knee on your neck pressure applied by the Alfred Hitchcock strings on “My Feet Keep Dancing,” those eccentric and quirky chord progressions that felt like a foreign version of jazz in stretches expressed those racial and cultural vibe switches getting ready to happen in the country.
From Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan, a ’60s hippie generation either started to pay the price for their ’70s hedonism or bite the bullet and get on board with “Reaganomics” and its promotion of tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation that supposedly aimed to stimulate the economy, but in actuality created high unemployment for the underclass.
Substitute the lyric “dancin” for hustling, struggling, barely surviving, and you have that looming fear in its entirety, constructed in this languid, plush, extravagant arrangement designed for movement and contemplation all at once. “My Feet Keep Dancing,” with those keyboard refrains and the traveling without moving bass work from Edwards, plus the tap dancing section which points back at the depression; hard times. The dance floor always knows first.
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