Nile Rodgers

There is a guitar you have heard hundreds of times without knowing whose it was: that funky, fast, sparkling strum that makes a body move on its own.

It belongs to Nile Rodgers, and it is on so many hits that it is hard to believe it is a single person.

Founder of CHIC, and above all a producer and guitarist behind the scenes, he is one of those invisible architects — like Quincy Jones — who shaped the way popular music sounds for half a century.

And almost nobody would recognise his face.

The hand you would recognise

Before the hits, it is worth telling where that guitar came from, because the contrast is enormous.

Nile Rodgers was born in New York in September 1952, into a bohemian, chaotic family: his mother and his stepfather were heroin addicts, and he grew up surrounded by strange people coming in and out of the house, looking after himself from a very early age. His biological father was an itinerant percussionist who was almost always absent.

Out of that childhood, and out of a life that led him to run a chapter of the Black Panther Party in lower Manhattan, to play in the Sesame Street touring band and in the house band at the Apollo Theater backing Aretha Franklin and Parliament-Funkadelic, came his style.

Rodgers plays the guitar as though it were percussion: he does not play long chords, he plays rhythmic, short hits that get into your hips. It is a technique inherited from James Brown's guitarists, like Jimmy Nolen, and from his own jazz training.

He calls it "chucking". That strum is his signature, as recognisable as a voice.

The riff that helped give birth to hip-hop

At the end of the seventies, with his partner the bassist Bernard Edwards, he formed CHIC, one of the key bands of the disco era. They made "Le Freak" — more than seven million singles sold, the best-selling in the history of Atlantic Records — and "Good Times".

And here is one of the biggest facts in the history of music.

The groove of "Good Times" is the basis of "Rapper's Delight", by the Sugarhill Gang, the first hip-hop track to enter the American Top 40.

It is worth being precise about how, because it tends to be told wrong: it was not a sample. Sugar Hill's session band played the groove again, note for note, without permission. Rodgers and Edwards threatened to sue, and the settlement ended up leaving them as the only credited writers of "Rapper's Delight".

Which means that the track that opened hip-hop's door to the wider public is signed by the two guys from CHIC.

"Good Times" is also one of the most sampled songs of all time, and it inspired "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen. That is documented too, and better than it is usually told: John Deacon was in the studio with Rodgers when he wrote the track, and Brian May has said that Deacon adored him.

The partnership with Edwards ended all at once. On 18 April 1996, in Tokyo, Edwards fainted during CHIC's concert at the Budokan and refused to cancel. The next morning Rodgers had his hotel room opened and found him dead: a fulminant pneumonia, at forty-three.

The hand you would recognise was really two hands. Since that morning in Tokyo there has been one.

The man behind other people's hits

The most astonishing thing is the list of artists he produced or played their biggest hits for. It makes your head spin.

For David Bowie he co-produced "Let's Dance", the best-selling record of his career, and that danceable rhythm guitar is Nile's. For Madonna he produced "Like a Virgin", the album that launched her into the stratosphere. For Diana Ross, "I'm Coming Out" and "Upside Down". For Sister Sledge, "We Are Family". For Duran Duran, the album "Notorious", and the remix of "The Reflex", which in June 1984 gave them the first of their two American number ones.

It is worth saying right here, in an article about credit handed out badly: the solos on "Let's Dance" are not his. Rodgers co-produced the record and played the rhythm guitar; the solos were played by Stevie Ray Vaughan, then an unknown, on six of the eight songs.

And he worked with Mick Jagger, with Debbie Harry, with Peter Gabriel, with a great many more.

He had a gift: walking into another artist's world and finding their hit, that precise sound that made them massive, without stealing their identity.

Get Lucky, and starting over

In 2013, two French robots — Daft Punk — were looking for the warm, human sound of seventies disco music for their major work.

They called the man who had created that sound.

His sparkling guitar is the heart of "Get Lucky", which won the Grammy for Record of the Year. It was a perfect recognition: the new generation of electronic music going back to the source to find the soul they were after.

And "Get Lucky" introduced him to millions of young people who had not been born when he was already making history.

There is something else that makes his vitality admirable. In October 2010 he was diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer, which he talks about openly; he was given the all-clear in 2013, in 2017 two cancers were found in one kidney, and on 4 July 2019 he declared himself cancer-free. Since 2018 he has been chairman of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

What to remember

Nile Rodgers is proof that some of the most important musicians in the world are the ones almost nobody recognises.

Put on "Le Freak", "Good Times", "Let's Dance", "Like a Virgin" or "Get Lucky", and you are hearing, in all of them, the same hand.

A boy raised in chaos who turned a guitar into a percussion instrument and with it made the planet dance for half a century, helped open the door for hip-hop, and gave half a dozen legends their biggest hits.

He survived a difficult childhood, drugs, cancer, and he is still there playing that strum you would recognise anywhere even if you never knew his name.

The next time a song makes your body move without meaning to, pay attention. There is a very good chance that Nile's guitar is behind it.

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Sources

Nile Rodgers (New York, 19 September 1952), American guitarist, songwriter and producer, co-founder with the bassist Bernard Edwards of the band CHIC, in 1977. He grew up in a family in which his mother, Beverly Goodman, and his stepfather, Bobby Glanzrock, were heroin addicts; his biological father, an itinerant percussionist, was almost always absent and died in 1970. He ran a chapter of the Black Panther Party in lower Manhattan, played in the Sesame Street touring band —where he met Bernard Edwards, in 1970— and in the house band at the Apollo Theater, backing Aretha Franklin, Nancy Wilson, Ben E. King and Parliament-Funkadelic. His rhythmic, percussive guitar technique, which he calls "chucking", is inherited from James Brown guitarists such as Jimmy Nolen. With CHIC he created disco-era hits such as "Le Freak", the best-selling single in the history of Atlantic Records with more than seven million copies, and "Good Times", whose groove was the basis of "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang, the first hip-hop track to enter the American Top 40; it is worth being precise that this was not a sample, but a studio reinterpretation by the label's session band, after which Rodgers and Edwards threatened to sue and ended up credited as the sole writers of the song. "Good Times" likewise inspired "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen: Rodgers has noted that John Deacon was with him in the studio when he wrote it, and Brian May has confirmed Deacon's admiration for his work. As a producer he signed "Let's Dance" by David Bowie, "Like a Virgin" by Madonna, "We Are Family" by Sister Sledge, "I'm Coming Out" and "Upside Down" by Diana Ross and "Notorious" by Duran Duran, as well as the remix of "The Reflex", which in June 1984 gave that band the first of its two number ones on the Billboard Hot 100; the second, "A View to a Kill" (July 1985), did not involve Rodgers. In 2013 he co-wrote and played the guitar on "Get Lucky" by Daft Punk, with Pharrell Williams, which won the Grammy for Record of the Year. Caution is advisable regarding the sales figures attributed to his work: his official site speaks of more than 500 million albums and 75 million singles, while other sources raise the count to 750 million, without independent auditing. In October 2010 he was diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer, from which he was given the all-clear in 2013; in 2017 two cancers were detected in one kidney, and on 4 July 2019 he declared himself free of the disease. He has been chairman of the Songwriters Hall of Fame since 2018. David Bowie, Madonna, Duran Duran, Debbie Harry, Peter Gabriel, Aretha Franklin, Queen, Quincy Jones and Daft Punk have their own profiles in this series. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of his work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, The Guardian, nilerodgers.com, AllMusic and other coverage.