FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
CHIC - Risqué
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FOR this Vinyl Corner…
I wanted to feature a hugely influential CHIC album. Risqué is the third studio from the iconic Disco act. Released on 30th July, 1979, it is one of the defining albums of the Disco age. Risqué has gone on to influence artists across multiple genres. A tremendous album that boasts some of CHIC’s best songs, Risqué is an album people should get on vinyl. I want to work in a couple of reviews for a classic album. Before that, The Guardian published a feature in 2011, where Paul Lester explained why the incredible Risqué was his favourite album:
“It was their anonymity – they even called themselves the Chic Organisation – that I liked. It meant I could project my own emotions on to the music. Part of the R&B continuum of behind-the-scenes professionals, Rodgers and Edwards were the Timbaland and Pharrell Williams of their day. They were amazingly prolific. In six years, they wrote and produced more than a dozen albums (for Chic and others, including Sister Sledge and Diana Ross), making a mockery of the idea of the precious artist whose every recorded utterance takes years of struggle.
Rodgers's backstory couldn't have been more "authentic", what with his mother giving birth to him at 14 and his period as a Black Panther. Not to mention the time he flatlined after narcotic overindulgence. God knows Nile 'n' Nard could have sung the blues; instead, they chose to alchemise them. Risqué is an act of sublimation: pure ethereal sorrow. Given Rodgers's past, it could have been the militant missing link between Parliament and Public Enemy rather than this, this … this what? The classically trained Rodgers has likened Chic's idiosyncratic chord structures and complex, sophisticated arrangements to early-20th century French music or jazz. Julie Burchill declared the band better than the Beatles. Just after punk, this kind of posturing provocation was rife in the music press, but it was spot-on. I bought Risqué and Revolver the same day and found the latter unlistenably thin next to the mighty Chic.
The genius of the performances was that you didn't even notice them individually. Edwards's bass creativity, Rodgers's choppy guitar and Tony Thompson's drumming were dexterous but never intruded on the song. As for the singing, there were surely more accomplished vocalists, and ones more demonstrably passionate, than Anderson and Martin, but that's why they were so great. These were object lessons in restraint.
If anything stood out, it was the strings. But the stabbing, staccato violins (Rodgers was a Bernard Herrmann fan) perfectly suited Risqué, a virtual concept album about the agony that people inflict on each other. Opener Good Times seemed positive enough but dropped lyrical barbs every few bars ("You silly fool, you can't change your fate") to signal the irony of the title. No wonder it provided the basis for a new genre whose raison d'etre was the exposition of the notion that the times were anything but good.
There was no precedent for A Warm Summer Night. Only Rose Royce's Love Don't Live Here Anymore came close to this six minutes of longing, with no hope of fulfillment. "It would be … so nice … tonight," one of the Chic girls sang, and you just knew "it" would never happen. She was alone and the gaps in the music captured her isolation. My Feet Keep Dancing, with its tap-dance interlude harking back to the Depression era, was another Chic flight from grim reality. I read it as a song about immersing yourself in hedonistic pursuits to escape the gloom of rejection: abandon as a distraction from abandonment. But that could have just been me.
On side two, My Forbidden Lover was a torrid melodrama whose lyrics were almost haiku-like in simplicity. It was a sort of companion piece to Bowie's Heroes, another song about verboten romance, although here you sense the barrier was racial not cultural. As ever, the rhythms were divine. Can't Stand to Love You was the weakest, and shortest, of the seven tracks, but it held the key to the album's theme of covert unpleasantness: "Little punk do it for me, or I'll number your days." Eat that, Costello.
Will You Cry (When You Hear This Song) was the ultimate title for the ultimate relationship swan-song/affair death-march. Ravishingly beautiful, it made heartache seem appealing, even as its cyclical pattern evoked a Dantean trudge through love's darker chambers. My favourite track on my favourite album, this was the one that contained Risqué's central premise ("love is pain"), with the further threat that "pain could be pleasure if you would have only realised." Realised what? They never said, which added to the glamour and mystery suggested by the 30s-whodunnit scene on the front cover”.
If you have not heard of CHIC’s masterpiece, Risqué, then I would advise and urge people to take a listen. It is an album that is just right for vinyl. That proper listening experience where you can feel the groove in every groove. In their review, this is what AllMusic had to say about the 1979 album:
“Chic was very much in its prime when it recorded its third album, Risqué, which contained hits that ranged from "My Feet Keep Dancing" and "My Forbidden Lover" to the influential "Good Times." That feel-good manifesto is one of the first songs that comes to mind when one thinks of the disco era and the Jimmy Carter years, but Chic's popularity certainly wasn't limited to the disco crowd. The fact that "Good Times" became the foundation for both the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" and Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" tells you a lot -- it underscores the fact that Chic was influencing everyone from early rappers to art rockers. A group that many rock critics were so quick to dismiss was having an impact in many different areas. From hip-hoppers to new wavers in London and Manchester, Risqué was considered primary listening. And Risqué is impressive not only because of its up-tempo cuts, but also because of slow material that includes the lush "A Warm Summer Night" and the dramatic ballad "Will You Cry (When You Hear This Song)." Risqué is definitely among Chic's essential albums”.
Ranked as one of the best albums ever by multiple sites and sources, Risqué’s standout tracks (such as Good Times) are staples. The songwriting and production from Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers. Is phenomenal! This is how the BBC assessed an album that stands alongside the greatest of the 1970s:
“Chic’s third album, Risqué, is one of the greatest exhibits in the case for disco’s defence. Released in the summer of 1979, it was as integral to the Atlantic label as any of the great rock albums that had taken the imprint out of Black America and into the world in the late 60s. With a budget of $160,000, it was a widescreen record with widescreen ambitions.
Good Times, with its striking, repetitive strangeness, is the greatest track here. It nodded to the Great Depression, with guitarist Nile Rodgers partially recycling the lyrics to the US 1930s standard Happy Days Are Here Again. It’s a masterful song, yet smacks somewhat of a distant desperation, a robotic reminder that if you repeat a mantra of happiness long enough you may finally actually believe in it. All the component parts of Good Times continually surprise: the four-note string refrain alternating on the verse; the almost claustrophobic unison of the vocals; and then the break. Bassist Bernard Edwards’ 20-note riff drives the record forward over Tony Thompson’s crispest snare-crack. It was used on street corners throughout the world as the backing to what disco did next: hip hop
Of the album’s six other tracks, My Forbidden Lover explored the irresistible urge of the forbidden. What About Me centred on 70s selfishness. Can’t Stand to Love You was a dark vignette about sinister love ("Little punk do it for me, or I’ll number your days"), and Will You Cry (When You Hear This Song) is a painfully beautiful ballad, one of vocalist Alfa Anderson’s best performances. My Feet Keep Dancing demonstrates both Chic’s intelligence and sophistication. It underlines how dance is a celebration of life, even with the sound of vaudeville tap dancing as the ‘solo’. Only the beautiful A Warm Summer Night seems to drift by without any deeper agenda.
Risqué is an album that dwells on relationships: bleak, unrequited ones, tinged with sadism and despair; relationships with the past, and, of course, with the dance floor. As a result, it remains Chic’s most sustained artistic statement, a celebration of a 70s that was collapsing under its own excess and hedonism. Risqué is all angular veneers, thrown shapes and dark shadows – it is the disco album as a rock classic”.
An album that I think is an essential vinyl purchase, Risqué stands up and still sounds unbeatable and peerless all these years later. Seven tracks of perfection, go and seek out this remarkable album. You do not need to be a Disco or CHIC fan to appreciate this diamond. Even though Risqué is not wall to wall up-tempo, it is the more spirited moments that stand out. This is an L.P. that should be…
IN everyone’s collection.