423. Chic - C'est Chic (1978)





















Track Listing

1. Chic Cheer
2. Le Freak
3. Savoir Faire
4. Happy Man
5. I Want Your Love
6. At Last I Am Free
7. Sometimes You Win
8. (Funny) Bone

Review

Here's Disco! Around this time particularly in the States there was the whole Disco Sucks movement, and while it is true that a lot of Disco sucks, that whole movement was slightly misguided, because if there was a load of shit in Disco the same was true of the Hard Rock scene or whatever and then you had some gems in disco. This album is one of those.

C'est Chic is basically the album that the P-Funk would have made if their primary concern was to sell albums. High quality party music but with high commercial expectations. It is actually a pretty nifty album.

It is refreshing to listen to something as uncomplicated as this but still being some quality music. The funk influence is the most apparent thing in this album but then it is danceable... and what is wrong with that? Unfortunately not all Disco albums were as good as this and in about two years the whole scene would be dead. But they left some good remains.

Track Highlights

1. Le Freak
2. I Want Your Love
3. Chic Cheer
4. At Last I Am Free

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

"We were so fucked off at what had happened. I mean, it was Studio 54, it was New Year's Eve, it was Grace Jones, and we were wearing the most expensive outfits that we had — back then, in the late '70s, our suits must have cost us a couple of thousand bucks each, and our really fancy shoes had got soaked trudging through the snow. So 'Fuck Off' was a protest song, and we actually thought it was pretty good — 'Aaaaahh, f**k off!' It had a vibe. I was thinking 'This could be the anthem of everybody who gets cut off on the street by a cab driver or any kids who want to say this to their parents.' You know, 'Hey, I wasn't saying it, man! I was just playing the record.'

"We really had pretty big designs on completing the song as 'Fuck Off'. You've got to remember, we didn't think of that prior to sitting down and playing. Once we did sit down and play and started singing that hook, it sounded good; just as good as 'freak out'. In fact, had we not come up with ' off' we would never have written 'Freak Out' and some other song would have been our big hit record. We were screaming it: 'Aaaaahh, fuck off!' Bernard and I usually wrote the hook of a song first, and then once we felt we had a chorus that would pay off, the rest of the song would follow. So, that night we actually converted 'fuck off' to 'freak out'. That was part of the process that first night. First, we changed it from 'fuck off' to 'freak off', and that was pretty hideous. We were singing it and just stumbling over 'freak off', because it was so lame by comparison. Then, all of a sudden it just hit me. For one second the light bulb went on and I sang 'Aaaaahh, freak out!'"

Le Freak: