Chic

The phenomenology of disco music is a complex subject that slips away on every side. Nile Rodgers claimed it was a form of celebration for the civil rights won by categories that had until then been discriminated against. Feminism, black power and Lgbt activists had formed a front that, far from being unified or free of internal contradictions, had nonetheless shaken the established order. In the early Seventies, up until roughly the mid-decade, Rodgers' illusion – and certainly not his alone – was that they were one step away from completing that journey.

Other key figures of that era, however, offered a different reading. Take George McCrae, who explained the success of "Rock Your Baby" (1974) as the need to escape a society whose divisions were still, in truth, deeply painful, since the revolution of the Sixties had never really been absorbed. What's more, the United States was sinking into the economic abyss of stagflation, whose direct consequence, by the end of the decade, would be the rise of Ronald Reagan and the most aggressive strain of neoliberalism.

Rodgers's vision and McCrae's are nonetheless not two parallel realities: even if it's hard to reconcile them, it's also true that one can be read as a consequence of the other. In essence, the euphoria of an initial sense of victory can be followed by the need to escape a reality in which the hoped-for results were never achieved.

Exactly when one perception gives way to the other is obviously a matter of personal sensibility: in 1974, McCrae was already sensing a climate of social breakdown, while as late as the following year Rodgers still felt there was something to celebrate, pointing to the end of the Vietnam War as the moment of his greatest conviction.

Whether one prefers one interpretation outright, or believes it's fair to link the two together, the outcome doesn't change: in practice, disco music eased political tension.

It isn't actually true, as is sometimes claimed, that disco was the first movement in which Black and white audiences became interchangeable. If white listeners bought Chic records and Black listeners bought Bee Gees records, it's impossible not to notice that, back in the Sixties, white audiences were already buying Motown artists while Black audiences were buying the Beatles - and one could go back much further still, to jazz festivals like Newport, where Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington performed for an exclusively white audience.

The only minority to have gained anything politically from disco music was the LGBT community, which was able to mount a forceful attack on the forced machismo of Western masculinity through a string of figures able to display their feminine side (or, conversely, women more masculine than average, like Grace Jones).

For women and Black communities, however, it amounted to a lowering of the guard, one whose long-term consequences the disco movement proved unable to withstand. One could say, paradoxically, that disco was born already carrying within it the seeds of its own defeat.

On June 12, 1979 - not even a year after the release of the Chic album that gives this article its title - the Disco Demolition Night took place: arguably the single most violent and reactionary event in the history of Anglophone popular music (this isn't the place to analyze it in depth, but readers are encouraged to look into it themselves).

Does all this mean that disco's role in easing political tension should be judged negatively? Not necessarily: hedonism is part of human nature and deserves its own outlets. What is certain is that, for a large share of the poorer urban population, disco represented a psychological lifeline during one of the most economically unfortunate periods of the postwar United States. That is no small achievement.

Nile Rodgers, however, will go down in history not so much as disco's leading theorist, but as its most important producer. A formidable rhythm guitarist, and a capable soloist when called upon, alongside bassist Bernard Edwards he was a founder and the guiding mind of Chic, as well as the deus ex machina behind Sister Sledge, amassing a body of work that's hard to match.

Chic debuted in 1977, immediately finding considerable success with the singles "Dance, Dance, Dance" and "Everybody Dance". Both Rodgers and Edwards had, after all, already spent several years working as session musicians (they had played for the R&B band New York City, for Luther Vandross, and for the famous TV show "Sesame Street"), and it wasn't too difficult to land a deal with a major label like Atlantic, save for the usual couple of rejections that every musician with a solid apprenticeship carries on their shoulders.

Nothing, however, had prepared them for the impact their next album would have. Or rather, even before that, for the impact of one particular song, "Le Freak", which was released in September 1978 and reached number one on the American charts three months later, staying there for six weeks and becoming one of the best-selling singles of all time in the US market (it's best not to venture an exact figure for copies sold, since every source reports a different number: the one constant is that none puts it below two million, which is consistent with the song's chart performance anyway).

According to Rodgers, the song grew out of a jam session with Edwards, built around a refrain that repeated "fuck off": the insult was aimed at New York's famous Studio 54, since the duo had been denied entry during a party thrown by Grace Jones. They later decided to change it to "freak out", reckoning that such blunt verbal aggression would hurt the song's chances on the radio.

They then rounded it out with a French line: "le freak, c'est chic". A phrase that seemed to serve a purely phonetic purpose, given the assonance between "freak" and "chic", but which was actually loaded with meaning for its authors: the freak was a dance style, among the most popular on the floors of the time. The duo chose to latch onto it in order to exploit the sense of familiarity it would evoke in their audience - while elevating it socially: in their hands, the freak was no longer the middle-class dance people let loose to on weekends at the club, but, as decreed, became chic.

Rodgers has often spoken of his deep admiration for the jazz era of great Black bandleaders like Count Basie or the aforementioned Ellington, who climbed the social ladder and outmaneuvered racial division through their art. For those musicians, though, this wasn't a political act or an act of rebellion: on the contrary, it was a way of adhering to the rules of a society they hadn't chosen, whose widespread prosperity at the top they admired. Being chic, a trait associated with the wealthiest strata of society, became a way of simulating belonging to an elite: or rather, for Rodgers, after selling millions of records, it was by then simply a fact - but it was in his interest to pass that feeling on to his audience as well.

He was keen to appear elegant and liked the idea of being listened to by elegant people, or at least by those who took care of their appearance according to their means. A sort of ecumenical sharing of hedonism and refinement, probably heightened by his fixation on Roxy Music and the dandy-ish figure of Bryan Ferry (though generally speaking, Rodgers's musical tastes at the time were far whiter than one might expect).

The album came out in November 1978 and, riding the wave of "Le Freak", scored an instant transatlantic hit, reaching number 2 in Britain and number 4 in the United States. A couple of months later a second single was pulled from it, "I Want Your Love", which, while not quite matching "Le Freak", still climbed into the top 10 across nearly every English-speaking market.

Chic clearly weren't among the inventors of disco, having debuted in 1977, but that didn't stop them from leaving their mark on popular music as remarkably prolific writers and producers, blessed with the high technical calibre of the musicians they surrounded themselves with and a working method that was at once fast, precise and methodical.

It was a genuine assembly line: first the basic tracks, always recorded in a single session (with the odd overdub for solos). Once the whole tracklist had been laid down, they'd bring in the string and horn sections, having them record their parts for the entire record within a couple of days. Finally came all the vocal parts, which were structurally little more than an accessory, serving only as a radio-friendly hook.

That's obviously not to say they weren't valuable: the singers involved, all with soul backgrounds, were impeccable. On this record we find Alfa Anderson, Diva Gray and Luci Martin on female vocals, David Lasley and Luther Vandross on male vocals.

The album contains minimalist, repetitive funk ("Cheer Chic"), jams with extended instrumental bridges that build in intensity ("Le Freak"), smooth instrumental jazz with superb guitar virtuosity not far removed from George Benson ("Savoir faire"), dreamy, muffled disco led by tubular-bell motifs ("I Want Your Love"), and long soul ballads ("At Last I Am Free") with instrumental digressions (bass solos, arpeggiated guitars, airy string themes).

Edwards carves out two spots for himself as lead vocalist, on "Happy Man" and "Sometimes You Win", proving himself a refined, smooth-voiced singer, a perfect counterpart to his sophisticated, enveloping basslines.

The Chic sound machine reached its peak with this flawless album. A machine that many would look to in the years immediately following, even as disco was being torn apart by the furious backlash of DJs, journalists and politicians. John Deacon of Queen would look to it, trying to emulate Edwards's style on the album "The Game"; David Bowie would look to it when he set about crafting "Let's Dance" (enlisting Rodgers's help); Duran Duran would look to it with their sci-fi-tinged post-disco rides; and even Paul Simon, on "Hearts And Bones", stylistically distant as he was, couldn't help but want Edwards's touch on one of his records.

That echo would gradually fade, only to flare up again in the new millennium: just think of Bruno Mars's "Treasure" (2012) or Daft Punk, whose entire "Random Access Memories" conquered charts across half the world on the strength of "Get Lucky" and Rodgers's signature strumming. Even today, in 2020, Chic still runs, not so far beneath the surface, through much of R&B, especially on its more alternative and refined side.

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30/08/2020