ROLLING STONE magazine No. 305, 
Review by STEPHEN HOLDEN, November 29th, 1979
 
 

   
CHIC's "Risqué"


CHIC's signature sound - in which mannequin voices issue cryptic telegrams above a contoured bass, an agitated guitar and unusually light drumming - is one of the most evocative in all of disco, because it dispenses with such stock ingredients as heavy-breathing eroticism and synthesized gimmickry. It's airy and blank, spare and sometimes forbiddingly austere. Though the sextet's writer-arranger-producers, bassist Bernard Edwards and guitarist Nile Rodgers, claim that entertainment is CHIC's sole purpose, the best tunes here reverberate with repressed cosmic anxieties. The key verse of "Good Times," Risqué's near-masterpiece, professes: "A rumor has it that it's getting late/Time marches on-just can't wait/The clock keeps turning-why hesitate/You silly fool - you can't change your fate." In this highstepping disco anthem and again in the more trancelike "My Feet Keep Dancing," Edwards and Rodgers suggest that the end of the good times may be at hand. Love songs like "Can't Stand to Love You" are similarly ambivalent, since the protagonists appear perpetually addled and adrift in a disco fog. Finally, CHIC seems to question the value of fashion itself: this group's music is even chillier and more emotively ambiguous than the high-gloss haute couture photography that inspired it.