Happy Anniversary: Chic, C’est Chic

Looking back, it’s apparent that the summer was always the best season for the band known as Chic: a few weeks ago, we celebrated the anniversary of the band’s 1979 album, Risqué, which featured one of their signature songs (“Good Times”), and now we’re celebrating the release of the album which preceded it, which also featured one of their signature songs. In fact, if you had to pick a single signature song for Chic, your best bet would undoubtedly be “Le Freak,” which unabashedly promotes the band’s name and the title of the album from which the song originates – C’est Chic – while also effectively summing up the entire disco movement in less than five minutes and 30 seconds:

“All that pressure got you down,
Has your head spinning all around
Feel the rhythm, chant the rhyme,
Come on along and have a real good time
Like the days of "Stompin' at Savoy,"
Now we freak, oh! what a joy
Just come on down, to the '54,
Find a spot out on the floor.”

Written by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers as a left-handed tribute to Studio 54, “Le Freak” holds a couple of records: in addition to the fact that it was the first song to hit the top spot of the Billboard Hot 100 on three separate occasions, it also remains the best-selling single in the history of Atlantic Records. We suspect it would have achieved neither of these things, however, if – Nile Rodgers revealed in a 2005 interview with Sound on Sound Magazine – the original refrain hadn’t been changed from “fuck off” to “freak out.”

C’est Chic also earned a second top-10 hit with “I Want Your Love,” which hit #7, and smooth fare like “Savoir Faire” and “At Last I Am Free,” but the album led off with a track which is arguably the band’s theme song, “Chic Cheer.” Still, great song though it may be, it’s hard to imagine anyone selecting it over “Le Freak,” which – at least to our ears – just seems to encapsulate everything wonderful about Chic.