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Chic VibeZ

Fourteen tracks from a band that was dismissed as a disco act and has turned out to be one of the most important groups in the history of recorded music.


CHIC

CHIC were not a studio project with session players; they were a band, and that distinction explains everything. Nile Rodgers on guitar and Bernard Edwards on bass had played jazz and rock before they played anything danceable, Tony Thompson was one of the great rock drummers of the era, and Alfa Anderson and Luci Martin sang the parts rather than merely delivering them.

Rodgers and Edwards worked to a principle they called Deep Hidden Meaning — the idea that every record needed a concept underneath the groove, something being said that was not the same as the words. It is why their catalogue survives when so much disco does not: the songs are about something.

The band's commercial life was brutally short. The backlash against disco in 1979 made the name unsellable almost overnight, and both men spent the eighties producing other people instead.

What to listen for

"Good Times" appears twice here, including the original twelve-inch mix, and it is probably the most consequential record on this blog — the foundation of "Rapper's Delight", of Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust", and of an unmapped number of records since.

"At Last I Am Free" is the one to play for anyone who thinks this band was frivolous: seven minutes, almost static, and genuinely desolate. Robert Wyatt covered it, which tells you something.

"I Want Your Love" is the best single, and the arrangement — those descending bells, the bassline that never quite lands — is a masterpiece of construction.

"My Forbidden Lover" and "My Feet Keep Dancing" are from Risqué and are where the band is playing hardest.

"Will You Cry (When You Hear This Song)" and "A Warm Summer Night" are the ballads, and they are considerably stranger harmonically than their surfaces suggest.

"26" and "Savoir Faire" are the instrumentals, and Sister Sledge's "Thinking of You" closes the set as the outside production.

Go deeper

C'est Chic (1978) and Risqué (1979) are the two essential albums, and both are better heard whole than as singles.

Bernard Edwards deserves following separately — his bass playing is the most imitated in dance music and he died in 1996, far too early. Nile Rodgers' memoir Le Freak tells the story properly.

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