“ALERT: Yet another upper working-class white boy from Britain writes about a group and phenomena that occurred in another country when he was only 12″. It may not be the best way for an author to start a book about one of the most well known yet thoroughly underrated (disco) bands in history, and even though that statement is true, it is no way indicative of the content in this finely crafted book about the people behind the name and the music.
When Chic’s short-lived reign as kings of the disco beat ended in the early 80s, the founding members Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards went on to produce some of the most iconic hit songs and artists to appear in the last 30 years including Madonna (“Live a Virgin”), David Bowie (“Let’s Dance”), Diana Ross (“Upside Down” and “I’m Coming Out”), Duran Duran (“Notorious”) and many more. They achieved all this through their combined talent, finely honed business skills, hard earned social and political savvy in the recording industry, and their ever-present unwillingness to be controlled by anyone but themselves.
The chronicle of their journey from childhood to becoming a bonafide hit machine in the late 70s and their lasting legacy is the main focus of the narrative, often told by first hand sources in the form of quotes from interviews with the core members (Nile, Bernard and Tony Thompson), as well as some of the most important ‘hired hands’ in the bands history and a number of the other artists they worked with, all strung together by the author to form a continuous story. This rather personal retelling of their history is what makes this a very good read, because you get inside the heads of the people directly involved in it all.
There are a few flaws here and there, one of them being that the author can sometimes be overly positive in his reviews of the albums covered by this book, but that is easily remedied by putting on the records and deciding for yourself, and it could also have benefited from a more rigorous editing process, but none of that detracts much from the overall quality of the writing.
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Purchase: Amazon.com
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