Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny

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In interviews he is a great raconteur and so stories like the conception of Chic’s biggest song “Le Freak” linked to an attempt to get into Studio 54 to see Grace Jones are very familiar but there was a lot I didn’t know. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

A career that spans four decades and scores of hits, yet he has always been content being on the sidelines. Turning off the personalized advertising setting won’t stop you from seeing Etsy ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive.

charming and hard working in a world of junk, dysfunction, and the casual social destructiveness (rape, murder, incest, addiction, madness) that is sometimes concomitant with the more extreme and impoverished edges of bohemian cool. The two best bits in most rock star autobiogs are a) when they start to break big and have hits and the world is their oyster and b) when they go mad on cocaine and become psychotic party animals.

Rodgers's mother fell pregnant with him at 13, the first time she had sex, and after she split from his father she took up with Bobby, a white bohemian junkie. By 1979 a significant backlash against "disco" music began to take its toll on Chic's commercial success, but in many ways Rodgers' career was just getting started.This is a fantastic book Mr Rodgers modesty makes me respect him even more, this guy is a true genius, literally THE hit-maker, because even up to today, there is barely a hit song without him being involved. After Chic he produced Madonna's "Like a Virgin," as she was just starting to become a household name. But Chic was Rodgers’s concept — a minimalist funk band inspired image-wise by Roxy Music’s ersatz elegance and Kiss’s refusal to show their faces. Nile and ''Nard' (his name for Bernie Edwards, his partner in Chic) had a theory of trying to find the DHM, the Deep Hidden Meaning in all songs, what the DNA of them is, the key to making them a hit.

I'm not even that big of a fan of some of the areas of Pop Music that Nile has most worked in, but that almost doesn't matter at all.He has worked with many of my favorite artists, but is like an honorary member of my all time favorite band Duran Duran. He excuses Bowie’s failure to credit him for Let’s Dance by writing that Bowie feared “the world was starting to overidentify him with this single album,” a phenomenon that Rodgers understands all too well: “To date ‘Le Freak’ is my biggest [hit song]—though not my favorite. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The suave appearance of himself and musical partner Bernard Edwards always gave off well-heeled vibes of the black urban professional making a name within the sophisticated world of disco culture of the late 70’s, Nile, however, was pretty much a street kid. After a difficult upbringing, which he details on particularly, he found his love for the guitar as a teenager and began a part hippie, homeless beatnik life panhandling and playing music for money.

com, the Sell on Etsy app, and the Etsy app, as well as the electricity that powers Etsy’s global offices and employees working remotely from home in the US. This entry was posted in Book Reviews, Nile Rodgers and tagged aljarreau, bernardedwards, chic, davidbowie, disco, inxs, lefreak, let'sdance, nilerodgers. I don't know enough of his story to know what, exactly, he skimmed over, but I definitely got the sense that he isn't telling us everything. The precipitous decline of the disco phenomenon hurt and disoriented Rodgers and Edwards, but the evidence suggests they would have gotten disoriented anyway, and it hardly destroyed their careers. I feel Mr Rodgers genius is not fully appreciated or lauded due to his African heritage, he is the King maker of music and deserves to be crowned as such.If I was to criticise the book does seem to end rather suddenly, with Nile's cancer diagnosis (literally on the last page, along the lines of "yesterday I was told I had cancer, and I'm going to see the doctor today. The irony here is, once I was fully immersed and engaged into the technical philosophies of making music, was it when the DHM of his life, to include his young life, all came together like the many songs he helped bring up the charts.