4Ever Songs: Chic ‘Le Freak’

Chic was a group led by bass player Bernard Edwards and guitarist Nile Rodgers. Both were very successful writers and producers, combining to work on hits for Sister Sledge and Diana Ross.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1977, and they were invited to Studio 54, a very popular club in New York Cit. A singer named Grace Jones wanted Rodgers and Edwards to do some production work for her, and asked them to come down to the club as her guest. When they got there, they were not on the list, and couldn’t convince the doorman that they were the group Chic. All dressed up and nowhere to go on New Year’s Eve, they left and started writing this song as a reply to the doorman. They called it “F–k Off,” but when they decided to record it, Edwards wasn’t comfortable with the cursing, so they tried it as “Freak Off.” That title sounded lame, but when they made the opening lines “aaaahh Freak Out!” instead of “aaaahh F–k Off!”, they came up with a better title: “La Freak.”

The muses of The Musa: Erykah Badu

The tectonic plates move every time Erykah Badu wants them to. The first and strongest earth tremor was her debut in 1997, Baduizm. All those nostalgic for soul classics agreed about the excellence of that game-changing album (Erykah was the last link in the Diana Ross-Ann Peebles-Chaka Khan chain), as did the gourmets of black pop who came from the school of Janet Jackson and TLC and even the hip hop generation understood that that R&B was another dialect of the same language. But the earthquakes didn’t start and end then: with Mama’s Gun and Worldwide Underground Ms Badu even took on black rock (a terrain usually reserved for imitators of Hendrix) and with the incredible diptych New Amerykah, she took on the world of p-funk. Now after years of studio silence, only interrupted by a few mixtapes, the queen of afro has come back to the studio and stages to remind us that her elegant live performances are like a reverse striptease: every note, every word and every collaborator that dresses her show, make her more sensual, more exposed and more… Erykah.