Chic is an American band that was organized in 1972 by guitarist NIle Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards. Inspired after attending a concert by glam rock band Roxy Music, Rodgers began developing the idea for a group whose music and image would form a seamless and immersive whole, taking additional influence from the anonymous, make-up wearing American rock band Kiss. During 1977, Edwards and Rodgers recruited drummer Tony Thompson, formerly with Labelle, to join the band; they performed as a trio doing cover versions at various gigs. Thompson recommended keyboardist Raymond Jones, 19, to join the band, and needing a singer to complete the line up, they engaged Norma Jean Wright by an agreement permitting her to have a solo career in addition to her work for the band.
Using a young recording engineer, Bob Clearmountain, they created the track “Dance, Dance, Dance”. As a result, Chic became a support act. The title of the first song recorded as Chic was “Everybody Dance”, which was on their first album.
Wright was forced to end her relationship with the band during mid-1978, but she participated in the sessions for Chic-produced Sister Sledge album We Are Family (1979). She was replaced as a singer by Alfa Anderson, who had done back-up vocals on the band’s debut album. For the Sister Sledge project, Edwards and Rodgers wrote and produced “He’s the Greatest Dancer” (originally intended to be a Chic song), in exchange for “I Want Your Love” (intended originally to be performed by Sister Sledge).
The group endeavoured to express “deep hidden meaning” in every song they wrote. During late 1978, the band released the album C’est Chic, containing one of its better-known tracks, “Le Freak”. The resulting single was a great success, scoring No. 1 on the US charts and selling more than six million copies. In March 2018 “Le Freak” was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or artistically significant”.
The next year, the group released the Risque album and the lead track “Good Times”, one of the most influential songs of the era. The track was the basis of Grandmaster Flash’s “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel”. It has been sampled since by many dance and hip hop acts, as well as being the inspiration for Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” (1980), Blondie’s Rapture (1981), and two decades later, the bass line for Daft Punk’s “Around The World” (1997).
After the anti-disco reaction at the end of the 1970s, the band struggled to obtain both airplay and sales, and during the early 1980s they disbanded. Rodgers and Edwards produced records for a variety of artists together and separately. After a 1989 birthday party where Rodgers, Edwards, played old Chic songs, Rodgers and Edwards organized a reunion of the old band. They recorded new material – a single, “Chic Mystique” and subsequent album Chic-ism (1992), both of which charted— and played live all over the world, to great audience and critical acclaim.
