same thing happened during the era of Chic and disco. America was prosperous and all of a sudden we had the Great Depression. They called it the golden years right after World War I, the Roaring Twenties in America. seemed like the time of disco was during the Great Depression, or in Europe, especially Germany. And the best way that we could understand that was by going back in history. We talked about relationships between people. And when we first started writing with Chic, we talked about fashion. But we tried to make it happy and fun, even if you didn’t understand the politics. That had a stronger political component than it might seem, didn’t it?Ī. The lyrics talked about hedonism and dancing but also about bringing people together. In your youth, you had a relationship with Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, and later created Chic at the start of disco’s golden age. I mean, as soon as I’m in the studio writing, I wish I were performing. So, now I’m performing, and I can’t wait to get into the studio to write new music. What do you enjoy more, producing, composing or performing?Ī. Guitarist Magazine (Future via Getty Images) Nile Rodgers pictured in 2009 with his electric guitar. People tell me now that sometimes as long as a week after a Chic concert, they feel good. And that’s the kind of music that I compose. What motivates you to keep getting on stage?Ī. He continues to recreate his repertoire on the Nile Rodgers & Chic tour, which heads to Europe this summer. He survived the shock and unexpectedly reinvented the lineup in 2018 with another album, It’s About Time. Rodgers found him dead in his hotel room. After first calling it quits in 1983, Chic returned in 1992 with an eighth album, but after a gig in Tokyo, their co-leader and Rodgers’ close friend, bassist Bernard Edwards, died of pneumonia. His main band has had a few comebacks as well. Now, if you see a Chic show it’s more exciting than it’s ever been,” he says. I forget that I’m 70… I mean, to me, 70 sounds like I should have retired and stopped playing. He’s in Nashville because he’s in the middle of a North American tour as the opening act for Duran Duran, with whom he’s been close friends for four decades. He is exultant, wearing a black beret and sporting his trademark braided hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Talkative throughout the interview, Rodgers laughs out loud as he tells this story. But who’s that guy playing guitar? They didn’t realize that I had probably written songs that they all knew and songs that their parents knew, which is so strange for me, because now when people take a selfie, they say, Oh, I can’t wait to show this to my mother.” Bernard Edwards, Norma Jean Wright, Nile Rodgers and Tony Thompson, the members of Chic, in a 1977 photograph. “But Pharrell was already a superstar, so people know Pharrell. “ because the only humans that you could see in the video were Pharrell and myself,” Rodgers jokes in a video interview from a hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee. Nile Rodgers has had several lives and a few comebacks, but the decisive one was probably as co-writer and guitarist on Daft Punk’s global smash hit Get Lucky now ten years old, that song introduced Rodgers to a whole new audience. After overcoming a drug addiction in the 1990s that left him clinically dead and surviving two battles with cancer, last year Rodgers worked with Beyoncé on her single Cuff It and with the female K-pop band Le Sserafim he is also producing the next works of Coldplay and St. One might think that Rodgers’ glory days were in the 1970s and 1980s, but that’s not entirely true. But the 70-year-old native New Yorker was also the producer of Madonna’s Like a Virgin, David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, many of Duran Duran’s hit records and a host of songs and albums of all kinds, from Sister Sledge’s We Are Family to The B-52′s Cosmic Thing to the solo debuts of Diana Ross, Debbie Harry and Mick Jagger. Between 19 he was the leader of Chic, one of disco’s most successful groups, thanks to songs like Le Freak and Good Times (which, in turn, unintentionally invented hip hop it was sampled by The Sugarhill Gang in the genre’s first hit, Rapper’s Delight). The name Nile Rodgers may not ring a bell right off the bat, but everyone has heard some of the songs he played a role in creating.
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