Surfing the web I came across a terrific article on The Quietus reminding me of the virtues of disco super group Chic…

“Contemporary pop waterboards us with negatives,” says Mof Gimmers. This is why the return of the proudly aspirational Chic and Nile Rodgers should be welcomed…

One of the interesting things about disco (which never ‘sucked’ nearly as much as the various numbskull rockers that berated it so) is that, like a lot of popular dance music, it was aspirational and brought about through times of austerity. 1970s NYC was a pretty lousy place to be, and yet somehow young people became royalty via the dancefloor.

Clothes were handmade or stolen and these young peacocks strolled around, lost in wild fantasy brought on by that metronomic funk, swoonsome strings and insane basslines. Disco made you feel decadent whether your bank account backed the stats or not.

And the most apsirational of the lot were Chic, with their sophisticated take on the topic of having a good time, both the dumbest and most complicated thing for a writer to ever tackle. Complicated? Think about the successes of ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ compared to the cultural failure of the 1001 hits about being ‘in the club’. Chic somehow managed to take the notion of dancing and made the it transcendent.”

Continue reading here.

Everybody Dance! Do do do do… Clap Your hands, Clap your hands!

I remember first hearing Chic as a boy while digging through my parents record collection.

They had a copy of C’est Chic and I thought it was one of the coolest things I’d ever heard. The stand out track for me back then was “Le Freak.”

Do yourself a favour. Take some time to re-acquaint with the one and only Chic!