Nile Rodgers Presents The Chic Organization – Up All Night

Up All Night is and isn’t new. It’s absolutely no coincidence that this Nile Rodgers/Chic compilation comes so soon after Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. The latter album, which came out last May and prominently features Nile Rodgers on guitar, is more or less just a well-studied Chic homage. And while ‘Get Lucky’ remains pretty much the biggest song on Earth, it’s enjoyed a great deal by a lot who have never been compelled otherwise to seek out what we shall call ‘roots disco.’ So, as millions of Top 40s-dwelling millennials suddenly take to Wikipedia to look up the name ‘Nile Rodgers,’ this sees Rodgers smartly capitalizing on his own renewed interest.

But here’s the thing: everybody knows Chic.

Everybody’s sung along to at least one Nile Rodgers production (even if it was via an Old Navy commercial, or Puff Daddy), because his influence and legacy is that pervasive. Even while ‘Disco Sucks’ movements sought to assassinate the genre, dance music derivatives have dominated the pop scene in every successive decade – people will always want to dance. Today, it’s computer beats and synthetic walls of sound. In the seventies it was drum beats and organic walls of sound. Even in the 1800s, people had to get their dance music fix in the form of minuets and the like (to which they’d dance all slow and weird-like). The desire remains, in one form or another. All disco attempted to do was distill the instrumentality of rock, soul, and even classical music into something immediate and danceable, executed thoroughly by purposeful repetition and miles of over-dubbing.

This was a musical arena dominated by Chic, and in particular the bass and guitar hooks of founding members Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers. Rodgers’ dance guitar aesthetic is particularly unmistakable, whether in his hit-spring-loaded Chic, or in any of his producer work—producing hits for Blondie’s Debbie Harry (“Backfired”), singer Diana Ross (“I’m Coming Out,” “Upside Down”), Sister Sledge (“We Are Family”) and David Bowie (Let’s Dance), to name a few.

To say disco ever died is to welcome ignorance with a treacherously tapping foot. But Daft Punk does deserve credit at the very least for helping to survive the much-beleaguered genre for younger generations who really don’t care to study their music history textbooks (or listen to anything recorded pre-1989). Being the same who don’t realise “Get Lucky” is just a slight variation on Chic’s “Good Times.”

So whatever your camp, faithful disco devotee or Daft discoverer—the latter clearly acknowledged by the album artwork, referential comp title, and general timeliness of this Best-Of pack that surely exists in myriad forms already—Up All Night is as good a collection as any, but mostly it serves as a reminder of how much Rodgers has contributed to the present dance music soundscape. We observe in his shadow a sterling shrine of mirror balls and gilded vinyl plaques, regardless of how few offer up credit on a regular basis. (Fact: Chic was denied induction for the seventh time into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year.)