C'est Chic

Kyle: Today we’re talking about Chic’s C’est Chic.

Cliff: Today we’re talking exclusively about the song Voir Fair Off the album, say Chic by Chic.

Kyle: is that not one of the coolest songs you’ve ever heard? I’d be hard pressed to think of a swaggy or song. I think a number of times. We’ve talked about the green onions, swag, step hall of fame. I’m gonna have to add Swar affair to it. And much like the album say Chic, you just jump right into the groove, start feeling good, and it just keeps on going.

Cliff: One constant thesis throughout this episode will be if you can listen to the song Voir Fair and not feel or think a thing. We are not the same. The there that is maybe the most accessible. Don’t you want to like music a lot. Song I have ever experienced in my life, ever since we made the calendar a couple of years ago and this album was on it, and then this song was on it.

I looked forward to it all the time. I pull it out to people now and they’re just like, dude, have I just wanna make sure, have you heard this song before? And you get to go, all the way back through, wait a minute, who’s this? When about what? What’s that now? Okay. And it’s the, and it’s that guitarist and into disco band.

And it’s from when. Okay. And it’s this

Kyle: and oh by the way, even if this weren’t on that album, there’s fully half a dozen songs where you could do that exact same thing with, in fact, 13, 12, 13 years ago, that exact scenario happened to me with Funny Bone, the closing track on this record. Our buddy Mon was like, listen to this, Michael J.

Fox and Back to the Future Style. And I was like, bro, what the fuck is this? And he was like, chic. And I was like, good time chic. And he was like the very same. And thus began the journey that I’m still on all these years later of, oh wow. I should appreciate all of this. Particularly now Rogers and Bernard Edwards, but definitely all of this a lot more than I do. Chic organization limited. The one corporation we trust,

Cliff: Normally with a band so interested in being cool on purpose, I would use that as the entry into why I like the band. yeah, I love that they are pseudonymous people on purpose because they noticed that KISS could do different things as a band because they didn’t, uh, identify themselves as individual people.

And then therefore, not only are we not going to put ourselves on the album cover, but we’re gonna use this really specific aesthetic on behalf of the band and like, brand the whole thing. Normally that would be the door that I would go see. That’s annoying in a cool way, and I like it. But instead, the enduring thing I can’t get over about listening to this record over and over again is I have yet to become tired of listening to this record over and over again, and on paper that is

Kyle: you just, you can’t stop. You can’t stop listening to it. it’s like a full day’s thing, and I can attest because it’s happened to me for multiple full days where I’m like, wow, I think I’ve been listening to this for like 12 hours straight.

Cliff: I am a happy man.

Kyle: I am a happy man, by the way. Eight songs, 41 minutes, so 12 hours is almost 15 lessons.

Cliff: basically a Prague record,

Kyle: Basically

a, basically a pro record. I, you know, I thought about so many touch points with this record. I, I think in addition to all the things that work just on their face musically and aesthetically with, you know, the Black Roxy Music as Nile has described them, there are few records that are direct Pneumatic tube connections to so much music. in some ways, if Chic isn’t the quintessential American project, you know, where if you’re like golden record in space, what’s the thing that you tell the aliens or a time traveler about, like, where’s the first place you could start that could get you to all the other places? I could make a case for Chic and, you know, maybe, if not Chic, then certainly Nile.

And I’d be careful, and I know we talked about this in the lead up, I don’t wanna do the myth of the individual genius thing. I tend to only reserve that for princes and even that has, its behind the curtain moments. And as much as there is to talk about just with Nile, and I’d love to unpack that a little bit.

It really is about the Chic organization and like all the people and things and ideas happening here. John Fadi is on trumpet. fucking Luther Vandross is one of the vocalists on this thing. How many years did I listen to Sheik before I knew? It’s an embarrassingly late breaking piece of knowledge for me in relation to this group.

So it’s, it’s really, it’s a fountain of musical joy, but also musical knowledge and that’s what all the best stuff should be.

Cliff: 100%. And to give an initial tour of how ridiculously on point that manages to be about this otherwise semi obscure disco band to us in the modern day is like off the top. There are connections through to Sesame Street, the Apollo Theater starting hip hop. the disco sucks. it cannot be overstated how obviously directional all this stuff ended up being, which is especially weird specifically because this is inside of a genre that conceptually stopped existing pretty quickly after this record.

And yet we can see all the lines directly into not only what disco became, but what hip hop became to, what funk was and what it became. But then also every. Almost every individual musician here is another spiderweb in a lot of directions. Nile will be the easiest one for me because I have been aware somewhat of his influence of guitar technique for a really long time.

this is a type of dude guitar magazines loved talking to and talking about, especially back in the day. So there was a lot of stuff, not only about like chucking, which is we’ll talk about, but the name that they gave, a specific technique that he had, but like just down to thinking about chord inversions in string muting and very specific guitar technique that when you think about it and listen really specifically even at the guitar level is now actually transcending those genres immediately.

Like, wait a minute, I can pick this up and put it on a funkadelic song if I wanted to, or a jazz record or a pop song. I can pick up this bass and then put it in hip hop or a pop song over here in like the. The personalities, especially of both. Now Rogers and bassist, Bernard Edwards, like they bring such, it’s not just musicianship, it’s a near embodiment of personality to their individual instruments.

They play off each other in incredible ways. And through doing that, again, like make what feels now like completely timeless music, to me, the closest I can get to making this feel old or stale is a reach. But like, if I try to think of it that way, I can fault the production for sounding like it’s from the late seventies at times, I guess.

But like I, I would love to see this exact band live

Kyle: A hundred percent.

Cliff: Right now. I would pay a lot of money for it. And frankly, again, I would invite everyone I know because arguably this is like somehow the most accessible album we’ve talked about so far. to me, this started hitting on even the type of thing we talked about in the Olivia Rodrigo episode of like, just let yourself think.

This is cool. Just like, calm down, listen to how good this is. It doesn’t have to be a part of your identity. you haven’t listened to this, you’ve just missed some important cool bit of like culture in musicianship and like I just focusing on this record honestly, sort of like illmatic as well.

Like these records will now be played a lot more when other people are around me than ever

Kyle: Yeah. This is one of those ones that you hope everybody else is already really into, and we’re way behind the eight ball as longtime casual appreciators. but I suspect if both of us were sort of in the secondary, tertiary orbit of everything happening here, that there’s gonna be other people that are like, oh, yeah.

Hell yeah. Right on. I’m, I’m more on board now. this is not for the listeners of Questlove Supreme who already know every demo every. Everything Nile Rogers has ever played on and have a massive playlist of all his stuff going all the time. I don’t know. I’m finding a lot this season, this year with these episodes that we’re doing, these albums we’re covering

and almost inverse gate key thing, where it was like early on, there’s stuff that I want people to know about or not know about. My relationship to it is like outside in, in that way. And now, I don’t wanna say like getting over the shame of getting to know stuff at my own pace, but I’m just very much in a place in my life with art where it’s like, there’s some stuff that I know way more about than other people.

Like the Southern Christian metal scene in Georgia in the early two thousands, or like an average three 11 set list from 97 to oh three or something, you know, or like esoteric metaphysics books from the seventies to the two thousands. But there’s so much stuff that like we just don’t know that much about.

And that’s the great pleasure, I guess, of this podcast too, is like, we’re still adding on to the body of knowledge. I mean, how long ago did we talk about John Coltrane? And I’m still, there’s still a new thing on a regular basis where I’m like getting rocked by a John Coltrane thing, certainly by an Alice Coltrane thing.

And like new conversations and new things bubble up. And so like you’re always gonna be playing from behind. And I guess like that’s the exciting thing about life is you just are always catching up on stuff. There’s always more stuff than you have time and energy and attention to devote to it. And then you just run outta time and you die.

But at least you had fun the whole time. So I’m trying to let go of my guilt that we didn’t know more sooner. we’re just lucky to be here.

Cliff: Look man, if there’s people who know more and you’d be a cool person to talk to, you can come on this podcast and we’ll ask you questions. Okay? Like I, it’s just free knowledge for everybody at this point. I am so freaked out by dead internet. All I want now is for people to be

Kyle: Alive. Alive internet and,

Cliff: Just al alive and have a nugget of optimism about music.

Kyle: I was thinking about this exact thing the other day.

There’s that internet personality, uh, sly Ida, she is like making a cup of coffee in her kitchen and flashes up an album, artwork and then flashes up like factoids about the music. And it’s always incredibly obscure stuff for the most part. And then she’ll post stuff on her story about like, the things people say to her.

And she’s got this community that mostly seems very cool and supportive and grew to like a hundred thousand followers overnight. But occasionally she’ll get those weird gatekeeper people that are like, you should know more about this. Or like, actually, this thing is better or whatever. And she’s like, Hey, shut the fuck up. Don’t try to tell me things. I know things. And I, and my first instinct was like, no, I want you to tell me things like I, you just, I’ll go somewhere just to listen to you. I don’t know the things, you tell me more things. Why don’t more people have that posture the music and creative world? Just a spirit of like openness and humility.

I mean, I know why, but that’s its own two hour healing journey. Tune take with crystals.

Cliff: You’ve opened a door for me. You may not have wanted to open, but now we’re going to go through it. This is fun. I have been thinking a lot actually to this end, about kind of two trains of thought at once recently. One is I went back and read again how to Listen to Jazz.

Kyle: Oh yeah.

Cliff: Have you read that? Okay. So just kind of straight up to everybody, especially if you’re interested in listening to music in

Kyle: Ted Chia and um, sorry Ted. That’s the one, right?

Cliff: That’s the one. because I avoided saying his last name for now. Obvious

Kyle: I’ll always step on that. Rake. On behalf of this podcast,

Cliff: Thank

Kyle: mean it with love. Please reach out and correct me.

Cliff: Yes. Send, please send us an audio clip of you pronouncing it. We’ll splice it in. It’ll be

Kyle: I love, listen, people talk shit about getting a voice note. I love a voice note. I love, I love all the context of your voice and you walking on the street and all that stuff. So please, please gently call me out in a voice note.

Cliff: I would love to receive more voice notes. They’re extra great because you get to talk and then I get to read the transcript of what you said instead, and it just, it’s exactly what everyone wants. It’s. I’ll fill in my second train of thought in a second, but like, why the how to listen to jazz thing stuck out to me, for whatever reach this podcast has and whatever human beings we’re connecting to, that is a good book on the avenue of like, I want to think a bit about how I think about music on purpose.

And one of the reasons that that book is helpful is because, first of all, I think it’s brilliant in general that it just tries to use jazz as the subject matter. So here’s the most like aggressively inaccessible thing that you’re the most worried about listening to smartly. And then let’s walk you through it.

And then what happens is you’re going to get both ends of something. You’re going to find out, oh, there are people who have been thinking about this for decades and I haven’t, and that feels weirdish or, or maybe bad. And then before too long, that author and then every other person who’s been thinking that long is gonna come along and say, but that’s not always a good thing.

And. There is a way for you to, through understanding all these details about music, actually try to revert more like to your childlike state and learn to listen to the musicality of somebody, not as its complexity or excellence on its own, but how to notice when excellence is happening because someone has reached flow state because they’ve transcended thinking about music into actually expressing themselves inside of it.

And like it teaches you and helps you and encourages you in this way to like you’re evaluation and critique or thought or whatever is editorialization about what you’re listening to. You can try to make it heady if you want, but if you go too far in that direction, it’s gonna just snap you back to Yeah.

But what’s the difference between John Coltrane playing a Love Supreme and John Coltrane playing ascension, which sounds like nonsense for the most part, and like, why is that the same person? How are these valid? Is one good or bad? And all this so at once, I’ve been thinking a lot about that. The reason I’ve been thinking about it in the second train of thought is interesting phenomenon has occurred for me lately.

I’m betting it’s occurred for you too, Kyle. I am so specific about what I listen to. All the time that I had not encountered the AI song problem at

Kyle: If that’s right. Me neither.

Cliff: completely oblivious to it. And what I mean by that is, and I wanna be like clear ’cause people can’t see my face or whatever, you know, hopefully everybody knows by this point, this is not we may be sarcastic, but this is never an elitist conversation.

So I’m just telling you like, I’m, as a matter of fact, with the way that I engage with music, I never let a radio station play. Well, first of all, I, I personally don’t ever use like the radio station feature of a thing, but even when I did or would use something like that, it’s never like the, Hey, just go ahead and keep playing things that sound like what I was playing before.

I, I never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever do that. That is what radio is. And radio works away and it fits in the slot that it fits in for me. And so if I, if I want to have a lean back experience with subpar music choice, I’ll do that. Otherwise, I will suffer the intellectual consequence of having to constantly choose what I listen to, even if that means that I stop listening sometimes.

Kyle: I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older, it’s a me problem. I know that it’s a control issue and whatever, but I can keep the vibe better for everyone if I can just have this little thing that I’ve learned over the years that most people aren’t noticing. And it really bothers me a lot. You know, when the next note is the wrong note. The radio can be great. It can be three great things. And then if there’s an Imagine Dragons it, the Friday night is a wash for me. It was so very nearly there and then it wasn’t. So I get it. I suspect people that listen to a whole podcast episode about just one album probably also get it as well,

Cliff: for sure. Okay, so why the fuck did I bring either of those two things up? Okay. Because the A I DJ is never gonna bring, you say, chic

Kyle: may maybe, maybe lay freak. But then to take you in a totally different direction, that’s not going to satisfy you with the same nuances of the other things happening on this record For sure.

Cliff: Yes. What is the experiential train of thought in which a computer would go? SSIR fair. Now, I. And even if we get there, the path to getting there is gonna be so much less interesting than the one of you a human being. Cons, literally constantly saying, no, there is infinity music and there is so much I haven’t listened to and everything that I listen to has tendrils going backwards and forwards and up and down.

Like I, this is sort of like an early encouragement just to people listening like, don’t stop doing this. And if you have stopped or if you’ve eased up and allowed software of any type, even if it’s like from a good company, even if band camp wants to tell you what to listen to next, okay, take it as information.

Do not let it guide your experience perpetually. One, because you’ll have a better overall experience in this weird AI transition moment in general. But secondly, like you, you are maintaining a connection in that moment to art that it’s important. I don’t know how to express this. Like it’s a very important human thing that you can maintain and like, it’s part of what excited me about talking about this record at all.

Kyle: so there’s a bit of like the moral case for the real thing in what you’re saying, but I’d, I’d argue that like the essence of what makes Sheex so good, and like you said, this is the most accessible record we’ve ever covered, is because you just feel it. There’s an intangible quality that you just feel, and what you were just saying brings up for me, a, a thing that I have noticed and, maybe the data would the back this up and maybe it wouldn’t, but it really feels like a really positive era for DJs for like an age of the selector.

Again, like a real human person doing super cool blends and transitions and curations that you wouldn’t have thought of A lot of the stuff you’ve never found or heard of. And like club culture and especially black club club culture seems very alive right now between like boiler room, everything that Zach Fox and Jody are doing and curating.

even like, I don’t love the Spotify DJ feature, but. My wife has been using it because she’ll get these ideas about songs that are connected in abstract ways, and she’s got a whole note in her phone for like, let me try to blend those in ways that’ll, that’ll be interesting to me. And I swear to God, not a single one of the pairs have I thought of, or every single time she’s, she’s texted me one, it’s been like, oh, I wouldn’t have thought of that.

That’s really great. And because it’s,

Cliff: Alright,

Kyle: it’s right, it’s unique to the DNA of all the influences that have made her hurt over the years. And so thinking about this album, like AI could never do, I Want Your Love Into Love Sign the Shock g remix by Prince. And like, I know that shit would work. And I, I know a DJ would do that and it would go off on like one of those, I’m doing the thing in a coffee shop type things.

We know where people are just dancing and vibing in the background. AI could never, AI doesn’t understand those abstract, like when it’s real, you’ll feel it type things. So if the world’s got you feeling weird, I, I think we are aligned and saying like, find ways to feel more deeply human. Find like connections that don’t make sense.

Go out there, find the real thing and find other people who are chasing it and you’ll find your community and your like connections to new great music there. You’ll stay alive. The more human you try to feel.

Cliff: Hell

Kyle: let Daniel like beat you. Like if you’re feeling down, if you’re feeling really depressed, just pull up a Google image search of Daniel Eck and just look at his shitty face for a minute and just be like, win. That can’t win. Elon Musk. Just like, pull up a full body picture of Elon Musk and be like, that can’t beat me at being alive. I won’t let it. so good things. Good things. I think, I think worth, just like the quickest possible 32nd backstory. Now, Rogers and Bernard Edwards met in 1970 as session musicians. So worth noting that these are like guys that have had serious chops a decade before this record came out and have played on a ton of stuff.

And they’re in New York City, so they’re like Barry on the scene, especially Nile. They formed a band that became the Big Apple band and they gigged all around New York City in the clubs, that’s sort of its own thing. Think of it almost in a James Brown and the JB Sense of just like, you’re the evening’s entertainment and you play and play and play and you gotta have some versatility in some ability to do whatever, all respect to a cover band or a house band.

It just seems really easy to take for granted, but it is hard to do.

Cliff: Can we make sure to mention before we get too far from here where they met

Kyle: yes, please do

Cliff: while working as touring musicians for the Sesame Street Stage Show, which is

Kyle: so sick. Yeah. That’s incredible. That’s like

Cliff: Sesame Street are low key progressive homies over the years. We love participation in this show.

Kyle: brought to you by viewers like you and see like pay into the public good. ’cause you might get chic. It’s a, it’s real straight line between those two things. Everything is po, everything is political. It is truly that deep. they had a, they had a, they had a, they had, was an amazing name for a band from New York City.

You gotta love the confidence of that. Had a hit record in 73 called, I’m Doing Fine now. New York City broke up in 1976, I’m hugely reducing this. there are multiple books that are great that cover this. There is a book on Chic and now, now Rogers has an autobiography.

I read both. Both are excellent. the long and short of it is this idea around Chic was gestating and as we alluded to earlier, like multiple things that the KISS thing and the pseudo anonymity thing and the Chic organization thing and the power station studio thing. All these ingredients are swirling.

and. I’m just gonna read this blurb Inspired, after attending a concert by English glam Rock Band, Roxy Music, who counts Brian Eno as a member Rogers began developing the idea for the group whose music and image would form a seamless and immersive hole, taking additional influence from the anonymous makeup wearing American band kiss.

During 1977, Edwards and Rogers recruited drummer Tony Thompson, who was formerly with LaBelle, an ecstasy passion and pain to join the band. LaBelle also rips they performed as a trio doing cover versions of various gigs. Then Thompson recommended keyboardist Raymond Jones, only 19 then to join the band.

As he had worked with him in Ecstasy, passion and pain, needing a singer to become a full band, they engaged Norma Jean Wright by an agreement, permitting her to have a solo career. In addition to her work for the band, using a young recording engineer Bob Clear Mountain, they created a track Dance, dance Dance, Yazzy Yy Yaa.

As a result, they became a support act. The title of the first song recorded as Sheik was Everybody Dance, which was on their first album, chic Self-titled Release Under Contract with Atlantic Records in 1977. And boy, as a thesis statement for understanding this band, everybody dance is about as clear as it gets as a musical style declaration and a political treatise and all that.

So to your point about, I want to get everyone I know at one of these concerts, it’s because I want everybody to dance.

Cliff: I will agree with you while standing still at the edge of the

Kyle: Now. See, I think this is the one instance where a critical enough mass of people could actually get you to do it. I think the way that you have enthusiastically leaned into this record, this would be the one night, like in law at the end of Lawless, when Big Tough Tom Hardy’s character does a little jig ’cause they beat all the bad guys and settled into old age nicely.

I, I think you could have maybe crossed that Rubicon with Sheik and then you never do it again. And then we all talk about him. Remember that time Cliff danced?

Cliff: and I’d be like, I don’t think that I do.

Kyle: So self-titled Chic 77 brings us to this bad Boy, say Chic. In 1978, released in August of 1978, the band’s most commercially successful album, um, reached number four on billboard’s album chart and topped the US r and b chart for 11 weeks. It was Billboard’s 1979, r and b album of the Year, certified Platinum at number two in the uk.

And has a whole alternate version in Europe with some songs from the self-titled called Tre Sheik. Totally different vibe. Don’t do that one. I mean, it’s great. It’s all great songs, but this is an airtight document. Say Chic, not Tre Sheik. So we’re up to speed. You put down the needle on this thing. Where does the noticing start? Cliff, what’s your cold? What are your cold? Listen impressions.

Cliff: one of my favorite slash least favorite album opening moves. The slow fade in that makes you go fucking Spotify’s fucking up again every single time.

Kyle: And then crowd noise. You’re like, is this a live record?

Cliff: Yeah, a confusing start that quickly becomes worth it. But yeah, one of the first things I noticed, which then became a pattern I noticed in a few of these songs, and one of the reasons I have one, one of a thousand reasons I’ve started to love these songs.

So they’re just long enough to force a break from a standard format. They have to have a little breakdown, freak out, weird return vamp. So something, what they don’t do for the most part, and I’m saying this complimentary, they don’t repeat the same thing they’re doing or align their instruments rhythms over and over and over again in sort of like a drone or even what we would come to think of as like a repetitive dance song.

This is dance music. Before they called it dance for reasons we might mention, but the driving, everything on the downbeat phenomenon doesn’t exist nearly as much as you would think here when you pay attention to it. And so then specifically to that end around like three minutes and 20 seconds into this one, which is a.

Oddly enough a time in other songs that pops up, but there’s this like weird fill that comes in from nowhere. things seem to like arrive to the party a few minutes into the song and then they kind of go, mm, okay, so this was a drinking party, but we brought mushrooms. What do you think? And then it’s like, what?

Okay. And then it comes back and then we’re back to the main melody again. But like with a little twist, I’m like, there are so many fascinating things that happen that are almost to me akin to what Miles Davis would bring out as a band leader, where there’s so many good people playing all at one time, so locked in to what they’re trying to do.

And they all feel the groove so strong that it’s drawing out complexity in a way that doesn’t lose you or keep you from wanting to just like keep dancing and enjoying the song. It doesn’t, to me at least, like none of

the songs

Kyle: the Champagne of Bitches Brew.

Cliff: Yeah. And I can, you know, I can definitely start pointing out a few other things. But like that’s, that is the main overarching thing that I started noticing and a great reason to intentionally, actively listen to this record is also, it’s one of those that we’ve talked about before where it’s like, actually this fits every situation.

If you’d let it, great background music, great out loud things while you’re working if you want to, but you definitely get rewarded with an intentional listen, especially to the song structure and some of the particular instruments in here. And so all the way throughout these songs managed to feel, to me more like three minutes long and they’re packed with something interesting in every case.

And the interesting thing itself is always a little bit different from the last one. Would

Kyle: I agree with that.

Cliff: you like more examples?

Kyle: Yeah, I would. I always would.

Cliff: One example, and you’ll never be able to unhear it if you don’t know what I’m talking about yet. In La Freak it’s like two thirds of the way through the song. All of a sudden for the first time there’s this drenched in reverb, weird flat Casio 8 0 8 hit. what sonically had not been introduced in any way inside of that song.

And then just sort of drops in almost like they’re about to do like a mashup or something. And then it just kind of comes in a couple of times and then disappears. Man what was the discussion about that? Where did that come from and why? And is that funny? I can’t even tell if that was, we’re gonna inject this because it sounds really good, versus we’re gonna inject this ’cause that’s fucking hilarious.

Like, why, why wouldn’t we do that here?

Kyle: This record hadn’t occurred to me as having a sense of humor, but like it very obviously does

Cliff: funny bone. Definitely

Kyle: literally Funny Bone, but then Chic Cheer is, that’s si, I mean, it’s silly. I don’t regard any of it is silly and so it’s like, yeah, we can mess around a little because we’re getting down a lot. yeah. Sense of humor, but it’s more like. It’s not poking fun at anything. It’s like Joy Diviv, you know? It’s like, isn’t that neat? You know, everybody’s sharing a laugh at the dinner table type type. I mean, it’s the kind of laugh that if you’re dancing in a group on the dance floor, everybody’s having a good time.

You’re laughing at yourselves a little, you’re laughing at the of essence. It’s all just like, it bubbles out at you type stuff. Yeah. Sense of humor is, not something that I would’ve thought about, but it’s, it’s very much there.

Cliff: For sure. I, and you know, maybe I’m projecting it, but to me it, that is how it feels. Um, there is a lightheartedness, well actually, let me just say more about this. Speaking of like freak, okay. Original lyrics to this song we’re fuck off the original lyrics to freak out lay freaks, say Chic Freak Out was fuck off Studio 54, fuck off a, apparently driven by a singular moment where they were trying to get into Studio 54 with Grace Jones and had a deeply poor experience trying to do it. not only does that delight me

Kyle: and then the bouncer that wouldn’t let them in apologized on Facebook. In the 2010s, just like issued a public apology, like it’s still weighing on me. Oh, by the way, we did get the most famous disco song in human history out of this. So, you know, it’s not all bad, but it didn’t say all

Cliff: That I did not

Kyle: incredible piece of lore.

Like, are you kidding me? Why was this beef not settled eons ago? Why is it being mediated by Mark Zuckerberg?

Cliff: that dude’s conversations at parties must be insane. Tell me something interesting about yourself. Sure.

Kyle: It’s like in the other guys, when Will Ferrell Kneecaps? Arod? It’s gotta feel a little like that. Arod didn’t make like freak obviously after that, but yeah.

Cliff: similar to how we’ve talked about this same idea on many records in the past, when there are directly serious racial undertones being addressed, there is very often an intentional, not silliness, but lightheartedness in the delivery of that like direct kind of statement and, you know, expression, because that was.

Thought of to be and maybe is like a helpful delivery vehicle for it. It can sneak past the defenses of certain people without losing the people who understand the serious undertones of it. And so in that sense, is another fascinating, like cultural encapsulation, I’m sure we’ll talk about like disco kind of specifically and what happened to it genre wise.

We’ve also covered that in past episodes tangentially. to be able to deliver a sort of like, fuck you for this behavior, but also now it’s a song and it’s fun and we’re having a good time with it. And now I play it all the time, you know, every night live or whatever. Like, and that’s what we’re gonna make out of it.

We’re gonna make a clown outta you for this forever. But we’re not gonna like go burn down your house or whatever. Like, this is the path forward. And like to me, there’s, there’s so much of that looking straight into the camera type of lightheartedness here from, and, and I think what helps me see it that way is again, the two main musicians here being so phenomenally good.

Having experience with stage performance and like doing live shows and theatrical things where it’s like you are literally on stage. You gotta smile, you gotta play the song, you gotta sort of embody the performance at the same time. And on top of that to be, in a disco band playing songs that are going to then get played for dancing people really long and over and over.

Like, there’s a really interesting like, demeanor here and the fact that it surfs in between any real seriousness, but also like, this is not like a B 50 twos feeling record. This is not like there, there’s a level of silliness that it never branches into and the closest that it even gets to it is literally the end of the literal last song where they sort of also issue you a warning about not being too much of a clown.

the intentionality around all that has impressed me over and over again and hasn’t gone away the more I’ve listened.

Kyle: Couple that with this philosophical idea that Nile and Bernard had deep hidden meaning, or DHM, you know, where seemingly superficial songs had deeper narratives that they simplified the language of like I saw an interview where now Rogers was talking about like, that’s the core truth of our songwriting.

And to accompany that, we beat these songs into submission so we can understand them from every angle. Like we encode a DNA in all of these songs. It’s like the reverse voodoo thing. I, I continue to mention Voodoo, like you do Led Zeppelin, where like those guys unconsciously were surfacing a truth or a deep hidden meaning about music and like trying to stay in contact with the Godhead or whatever these guys were like knowingly trying to get to it, trying to distill to it at all times, which is, is very, very cool.

So I, it’s, at no point is it unfair to say. were they going for that? Were they thinking about that? Whatever. There’s a high level of intentionality, and I think that comes through in the tightness of the music, and like if there’s two notes missing from the full chord, that’s because Nile’s only playing three strings from being a stage musician where he was learning to cut through in the exact right place in the mix at any given time and not overpower the rest of the action.

It’s a, it is a very, it’s a, a dynamic that’s developed with a lot of aliveness and life experience, so that, that is probably a component of like why it brings out the aliveness. In listeners,

Cliff: I love that in that sense, connecting it back to what I was mentioning earlier about like how to listen to jazz. Okay. So in how to listen to jazz, one of the, one of the things that the author conveys is there is a thing beyond musicianship. It is when someone, you know, embodies the concept so deeply that they’re no longer having to consciously think about it and can actually express all of those things unconsciously while intentionally doing something else

Kyle: it described as timal sophistication, like knowing your role on a spiritual level.

Cliff: Holy shit. Yeah. Well that’s awesome. Damn. Okay. So similarly to that, through musicianship, I think the Chic organization shows compositionally that they like. That is why they can have a concept like deep hidden meaning, and talk about it and create shared language between two people where they’re having a meta conversation about their own music.

Because from a compositional angle as performers and studio players and all that, the experience of like shaping the music from the ground up is so embedded in what they’re doing that they are thinking through it, right? They’re thinking on the other side of the thing and achieving basically like cultural ends and designing experiences is a way we might say it these days that comes through all of that skill and all of that experience and partnership and trust happening. And so we’ll like, we’ll also definitely talk about how that gets expressed through NA’s guitar technique. But I think that’s one big piece of chic, one thing that unlocked a lot of their music for me.

And it is the thing that I am noticing when I say, well why is it that two thirds of the way through basically every song they do a thing because they’re shaping it, because they know exactly how long they’ve been playing that song. They know, like they could probably, my guess most of those musicians could probably tell you how many measures they had played at any given point in any of these songs.

And we’re making really intentional choices about when it is time to now do something else, come back, how long, all of that. And you know, that’s on the same level of compositional complexity. We talked about this some with like Charles Mingus records, but this is not that, like that is a really hard to grasp, bit of con of compositional excellence.

This one is, look, they made it for you. Don’t you? Don’t you like it? I bet you do. ’cause someone real smart made it for you and they want you to enjoy it. And that’s the whole point. So like having all of the subtexts that we talked about while still having the main message feel like it’s shut up and dance is really relaxing.

And then to have such excellent music filling in the back to that feeling the whole time makes this record really hard to get tired of.

Kyle: So you mentioned Nile’s guitar. I would love to hone in on some deep listening, concentrating moments, and you as my favorite guitar guy, I would love to hear you talk about. Inarguably, one of the greatest guitarists to ever pick up the instrument. Another thing that I failed to appreciate, but that is a very real dimension of this music.

But we can start there. We can start anywhere else, but I, I wanna make sure we don’t hang up the phone, so to speak before we talk about it. worth noting about Nile, doing away with a individual genius thing. He had an insane life, dewy Cox level. Just I could tell you to truth and a lie and all of them sound like a bald face lie.

He jammed with Jimi Hendrix, he did acid with Timothy Leary. He single-handedly revived the career of David Bowie. he’s had a major decade defining hit in every decade since the seventies. he grew up in a bohemian household where people like Thelonious Monk came to buy drugs from his parents. I think of all the people that we’ve ever talked about, only maybe Ravi Shankar rivals the breadth and depth of stories that this guy has. So not only is the technique kind of revolutionary, but like there’s a whole world of stuff that’s going into like, no, Rogers has to think about his whole life before he plays.

I know I’ve made that joke a couple of times, but like truly there’s always a lot going on in a way. And like you can see it as recently as he was on Track Star, the Man on the street interview where they play him the clips, he was on Track Star very recently and he takes longer than most of the people to get to the, oh yeah, this is dah, dah dah.

You can kind of tell he knows it, but he like stops and absorbs every time and there’s a moment of remembering. ’cause he’s just been on so much stuff and I really admired that it was a very small thing and it’s a like blink and you’ll miss it. But he does go on a beat longer. and you know, maybe I’m projecting this onto him a bit, but I don’t think you get to the level of prolific that he has been without like really feeling the music as an extension of your whole life in the way that.

That he seems to, I just, I frankly don’t know how he has kept up the pace. I’d put him up there with Rd Berman of just like, how have you done so much stuff? and

Cliff: It is probably easy when you look so fucking

Kyle: I know, right? I know. It’s a lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle truly. and he’s so, I mean, he’s just so good at it. There’s clearly a, we talked about the LeBron James of Nas. Both of them have obviously worked on their craft a ton put in there, 10,000 hours, 10,000 times over. But when you watch a clinic video, like there’s a, 20 minute fender video of Nile Rogers going through songs of his career, and there’s a song, there’s a video where he’s in a studio, like a four or five minute video, and he’s just going through what he does with his left hand and his right hand.

You’re like, there’s a dexterity, there’s a fundamental level, there’s a floor of physical technical capability that is very, very high for this man that he’s able to sustain for very long periods of time. So I think the noticing for me starts less with this record, but enable in, in order to be able to really hear this record fully, I had to go back and watch.

A lot of just Nile Rogers by himself playing a guitar to be like, whoa, this guy is dialed in.

So let’s maybe start there. You wanna start with guitar? Don’t you always wanna start with the guitar?

Cliff: Set your timers to nine hours and let me know how far I’ve gotten. Yeah, I,

Kyle: Let’s bust open the Timespace continuum talking about the six Strings of Doom with Cliff.

Cliff: so there, there are so many things to talk about. I’ll try to give a few different areas of this their due. But you mentioned a lot in there, especially at the beginning not only how prolific he is, but how interesting and unusual his experience was as a kid and how that might translate. So especially if you’ve, you know, studied music before, this is probably gonna set you immediately on the right course. He wasn’t necessarily one of these people who were like, he was four years old and he went to the thrift store and picked up a fucking guitar.

No, but he took the speed run path, which a lot of people have done, which is. He, yeah, he picked up guitar around the age of like 16. But before that he was a classically trained sight reading clarinettist and flutist, foist, foist. He played clarinet and flute and like we sort of mentioned some of this before, but like that is a really particular rail that you can ride because if you are a prolific musician who’s young, who understands how to sight read and then therefore write down and compose music and play instruments, you are locked in to way of playing music that whether you want it to or not is going to inform the way you play from there on out.

Like you didn’t pick up a guitar and just played GDC over and over again with your bros as they drank Bud Light. And then over time you went, oh fuck, I just played a Nirvana song. Like cool. Like it didn’t work like that. Like he understood as you do when you learn this way more of the sort of like mathematical basis of how music works.

Here is your sheet, you play these notes. Your job is to play only and exactly, precisely what you see in front of you. And I like, it seems like I’m pushing on it like I. I think that this matters when you are an adult or you are your own musician. If someone hands you a piece of music, you are able to go, okay, you probably want me to play this, but depending on the context, you may want me to play this.

But when you are young and you’re learning how to do, nobody wants your fucking thoughts. I do not. I do not need a, a little extra from the 9-year-old at the end, please play what is written on the paper so that all the other nine year olds sound right, dude. I think that not only is, is that a helpful way of starting to see how he began his journey, but then on top of that, because of all the exposure he had to different people, as a teenager, he played guitar with African Persian, Latin, jazz, and Boogaloo bands.

Now, all of those examples, every single one of them now is taking a classically trained teenager and saying, now here’s a rhythm that doesn’t make sense. Like every genre I mentioned is like, uh, yeah, take that, but don’t do that at all. Let’s do something different. now we’re gonna find grooves to sit inside of

Kyle: and oh, by the way, it’s very natural to us. We grew up with it.

Cliff: Exactly. So learning, like sort of in the sense that, miles Davis became like such a good jazz musician because of his experience through with, Diz and Bird and, and learning from sitting in their bands and going, oh fuck, someone is so, so much better than me. I’ve got to play faster and better in a similar sense, but without that same directional pressure for a genre.

Now Rogers learned to play guitar in basically all the world’s types of music as a kid, and, and I also feel helpful to mention like, this is a complete ass person. At that same time, he was the subsection leader in Lower Manhattan of the Black Panther party. so let’s not lose sight of any of that stuff either, the, that’s the sort of context and experience that this dude had to then become the person that we would go on to know who would do all of this stuff with guitar.

Kyle: And I, I would clarify that all of that is really important when you contrast it with something. So think of all the Berkeley guys that you know. I don’t mean people specifically that have a degree from the Berkeley School of Music. I mean, guys that play like Berkeley, guys, I’m not

Cliff: Berkeley guys derogatory. Yeah.

Kyle: I’m not gonna name and shame them. I’m not going to shame you if that is your deal. I’m not gonna yuck your yum. But, it doesn’t ever really get south of my Adams apple in terms of vibrating me, so to speak. uh, Ron Ashton could, could maybe do some Berkeley, some free jazz shit, but like, I don’t think a Berkeley guy could do.

I want to be your dog in exactly that way. and this is again, where Sheik is the perfect embodiment of that, of very technically competent, but also grooves really hard. A, a flawless, almost impossible to pull off mix contained in the very rich, impossible to replicate in a lab life of somebody like a Nile Rogers.

do we need to make fuck Berkeley bumper stickers for tune d

Cliff: As long as you put in parentheses, but Cliff would’ve gone there if he could have afforded it. I’m fine with it. I’m, I’m down with both messages,

Kyle: Kyle doesn’t play any instruments and he just hates it. Nothing psychological there.

Cliff: Having the context for why he would be such a precise musician, I think is really helpful context for like, the next couple of things I’ll mention here about technique. They all stem from exacting precision, speaking of contrast, right? Um, Jimi Hendrix, this is not, I would almost put these two guitarists on opposite ends of a spectrum with like Jimmy Page down there with Jimi Hendrix.

They’re playing sloppy guitar, and I don’t, and that’s not derogatory, but they play lots of, there’s sympathetic strings, there’s feedback, there’s over bending, under bending. We’re gonna like slowly approach that note. And everything in between here is actually off key until we get there. there’s a, a lot of, of messiness in what made them such incredible guitarists.

On the other hand, all the way over here. Now Rogers is functional precision to a degree that’s difficult to appreciate unless you’ve tried to do some of these things before. But two things really stick out specifically about his guitar technique. One is the thing that you’ll see pretty quickly if you try to Google any of this stuff.

Basically, he. There is like an Ada Pia about his guitar technique when playing rhythm called chucking which is not chugging, chunking, it’s chucking which I just hate. Uh, it has terrible mouth feel as a word. But what this really is about, this is selectively and very intentionally muting specific strings while playing really particular chords.

And I’ll mention some about the chords in a second. The chord shapes themselves allow him to perform this technique better, but basically like this is sort of like the opposite of a common blues guitarist approach where it’s like anything that could be in this key, I’m sort of down to have it in the mix and I’ll bend and play around with it.

What he is doing here when we’re referring to like chucking is extraordinarily precise rhythm guitar with then because he’s playing, this is really hard to only do verbally, but my hands are moving around a lot. 16th notes are the most common way that he sort of does this rhythmically.

So he is effectively playing. So if all right, everybody gather round, so four beats, that’s four 16th notes are da da. So that he’s playing that rhythm precisely up and down on his right hand. Instead of using his right hand to decide when the chord plays, he uses the combination of muting certain strings and then pressing down and pulling up on the chord shapes themselves so that he can go between the chord sounding out and ringing out when he’s playing versus playing effectively like a muted non note.

And so like he establishes like, this is really kind of like a common technique, but the thing is that no one can do it well. ’cause it’s really hard to, so like, unless you produce your way to doing it or allow yourself to have some kind of like weird effects on it or something like that. Most people don’t want to do this with clean guitar tone.

Kyle: The cleanest,

the cleanest tone imaginable, cleaner than West Montgomery Jazz. Pristine tone, like only an acoustic would be more honest in revealing what you are and are not playing, and the competency with which you are playing it. And by the way, the 16th notes, you could do a whole listen through just of Nile’s, right?

Nile’s right hand. It’s metronomic. It’s like the ac DC drummer. It is never offbeat. Even a little. Seems, seems quantized, but it’s 1978, so, nah,

Cliff: So lots of muting really precise for them. And then I love making a callback. Another time Kyle has asked me to be a fucking dork about guitars. We talked once about Stratocasters versus Telecasters.

Kyle: I, I made a note, I was like, does Cliff wanna do the Brooks and Dun Strat thing again?

Cliff: So, so Nile Rogers eventually started playing a Strat specifically for some of the reasons we talked about before, which is the tone and the way that the rhythm is brought out by a Stratocaster in its sort of brightness. Again, what we were just saying about like this, it’s not like a studio trick that he was precise about this.

Most people will want to go in the opposite direction where they would want to make this muddier sounding not more precise and brighter, where you can hear every fuck up more clearly. But that’s what Nile Rogers is doing. so that helps explain why the instrument itself that he played had a name called the Hit Maker.

It was eventually valued at, I can’t do the conversion today because the dollar is worthless, but over a billion pounds. It was worth at one time just because of like the supposed magic that resided inside of that guitar because of how many hits it had been played on. But like for the most part, it’s as my golf coach in high school used to say, it’s the Indian, not the Arrow.

And I don’t really know if that’s offensive or not. Uh, but

Kyle: It is not, not now.

Cliff: the point in it be it like no matter how much you think that special tool is gonna make you awesome, you can’t outperform your shit. Like you have to get good at the thing, at least at a base level to make that excellent sound that you want. So not only then is he locked in rhythmically in a really serious and, and like consistent way.

This is very easily to Kyle, your point, this is very easily an active listening point. If you want to go back through this record, like just literally listen to the rhythm guitar. It’s impressive. It’s interesting. But then to play on all that right, the, the selective muting of strings is better enabled by his chord shapes.

So if you play guitar a little bit, you’ve probably played like a power chord has a really particular sort of shape to it. You have three fingers. It’s 1 5, 1. And it sounds a really particular way, but it’s like there’s a reason it got used for rock. It’s really chunky sounding.

It’s loud, it’s thick, it’s direct. All of this that is again, the opposite of what Nile Rogers is doing. He is using not only his classical training from earlier and his ability to like know the types of chords you will encounter when you receive music from other people, but his chord voicings are intentionally complex, but in a really predictable way.

So he’ll even tell you in interviews, like for the most part, I think it’s like an F minor seven is one of his like favorite chords to play over and over and over again. Yeah. F minor seven and then F minor 11. So these are just like. Common cord shapes, and then the seventh, the ninth, the 11th, the 13th.

When you hear that, like that is an additional note further up, that same scale being added to the cord that wouldn’t otherwise be there. And depending on which one you do, it introduces this like small amount of dissonance. That’s why they’re really popular in jazz. It makes you, it leads you through things, but then like seventh chords and 11th chords are cool in and of themself, but if you know really precisely how to deploy them, you can kind of take someone on a journey just by adding one extra note to a chord and it’s gonna change the way that one chord to another sounds.

again, I remember like, I can’t believe how much I’m extracting from this one moment, but like reading how to listen to jazz, he was telling a story about, and now I’ve forgotten the exact individual that he was mentioning in this moment, but he was talking about a really famous jazz band leader and how when he was playing under them, or there was a story of it, like there was one person in a large band who decided to add a single like 11th to a chord one time.

This otherwise long song with a lot of improvisation and all this stuff. And he was just kind of feeling it in that moment. And then he got a little bit nervous about doing it because apparently this band leader was pretty like precise and maniacal about people playing what they were supposed to play.

And so he, he one time only in the entire song and he said like what blew him away is much later into the night the guy came right up to him and was like, I heard that and I liked it. And just like that level of like, no, he hears you. He knows exactly what you just did to the degree that while he was doing his job, he was able to prac like process what you were intending to do and thought to talk to you about it later because that’s how plugged in this person is to a fucking note.

So like that’s why this guitar playing is so good. He’s not only inverting chords to make their voicings interesting up and down the neck. He’s adding really specific notes, compositionally to give all these things a feel. There’s almost no straightforward chords in any of these songs and to keep looping around to things like, that’s awesome because this music is accessible to people.

That’s not usually the case, right? To get you to listen to like crazy nights and shit. I got to take you in a direction you don’t usually want to go, or that doesn’t seem right. And instead this is like compositionally interesting music at almost every moment done with such precision and you keep dancing to it.

that is the worst T-L-D-R-I think I could possibly even start to give about this. But I think that those are the two sort of interesting, like his rhythmic approaches and his chord approaches help you to start identifying what you’re listening to in the music and what’s interesting. But let me quickly then hit on what I mean by like how deep this dude’s influence goes.

Okay, let’s play the Will. Cliff mentioned them game rhythmically. the band that this makes me think of the most as a guitarist when I, I have played a lot of chic music now recently and tried to learn from it. I learned from Nile his practice technique. So we mentioned like 16th notes.

So the way that he got good at that is by playing 32nd notes. All the time with extreme precision as fast as he possibly could. Now, what that makes me think of is once you get to that level, so I already did, you know, 16th is da da, so double that. Now, if you instead of doubling that, turn that into triplets, that’s shuga, that’s a hundred percent shuga.

That is exactly how MGA’s guitarists play all of their music. I cannot express how weird it is to realize they are effectively doing very similar guitar technique rhythmically and in a, uh, I’ll be a little bit generous here, but like in that same sense, you play a very, very steady rhythm with your right hand.

And then your left hand technique determines when and how that rhythm comes out. Nile Rogers does this through chucking right through, through cord voicing, pressing down, letting strings unmute at the right timing. Shuga does this through pull offs, ba so it’s the same idea applied at really similar speed with a slight distinction.

But like now I’ve just talked to you about an extreme fucking Swedish metal band who’s known for playing faster than anyone else. And I’m telling you directly like. Not this would be, wow, what a fever, dream Nile could play this music. rhythmically speaking. That’s very much up his alley technique wise.

And is like, to me, like a really endearing way to like look at the instrument of guitar. Like how are these things connected?

Kyle: I am never gonna open a Suno account, so I need somebody to take up the challenge of making a disco version of MGA’s Bleed. Because now I can hear the lick completely clean tone in my head and I need it to happen is an itch that must be scratched. So even if it’s not the full song, I need the guitar track.

Cliff: it’s really just stinger.

Kyle: Yeah. But I need the, I need it Nile Rogers Clean.

Cliff: Yes,

Kyle: Which makes me feel like it would maybe be like Che Atkins maybe is like the closest thing to sounding like that. Some country picker or like a Glen

Cliff: plus a little bit of surf guitar. Maybe

Kyle: yeah,

Cliff: it’s got some kind of loo connections almost in that sense.

Kyle: yeah. Who was it of those clean telly guys? Was it Glen Campbell that did a great misou that was pretty famous. One of those guys had one. So yeah, we’re, we’re all barking. Shuga, Nile Rogers, Dick Dale being a holy trinity of some sort.

Cliff: Let me, let me do you one better though. I am excited about even this specific bit. Okay. Another guitarist that Nile makes me think of technique-wise very specifically, and I love how specific I’m about to be about this is between The Buried and Me is Paul Wagner for a couple of reasons. One is, we are living in an age now where some of our favorite musicians on earth occasionally like, post a story on their Instagram.

Like, what’s up? You guys wanna lesson like, yeah, I do. I do

Kyle: Kohler from Converge is teaching drum lessons. I couldn’t be ready for that exam with 10 years of nonstop practice.

Cliff: I bet he would be very sweet to you

Kyle: I bet he would. I bet we’d just wind up fucking around and talking about memes and stuff. It wouldn’t be about drums at all.

Cliff: So not only am I, uh, I hate this, but, uh, a relative like student of Paul’s playing specifically, like I, I really, really love between the barie records for the guitar playing. So there’s a connection I can see there in general. But I was able to take a lesson, a couple of lessons actually from Paul.

The second lesson was, okay, make this chord. She now add the seventh, now add the ninth, now add the 11th, now add the 13th, invert it, add the seventh, add the ninth, add the 11th, add the 13th, play the next chord, add the step. Like it was all like his entire approach to it. Like we sort of had a quick discussion about the different ways that we learned.

Like he doesn’t even think in the like kind of basic you know, you learn like the pentatonic scale and stuff like that early on in like the blue scale. Like he doesn’t even think that way. He’s composing and he’s really intentionally choosing notes to add to chords because unless they’re sort of doing a death metal thing in the moment, and even when, even when they’re doing that, they don’t really play simple chords ever.

That’s the whole point. I would argue their music is a lot less accessible than Sheik is. But like that

Kyle: They’re the closest thing to Berkeley Music. I’ll allow.

Cliff: Hell yeah.

Like

Kyle: And only because of that they, they’re only brushing up against it ’cause of that long dream theater adjacent period that they had that they’ve now successfully come out of Blue nowhere. The new album By Between The Buried and Me ladies and gentlemen, not a recommended if you like Chic, but if you like great things human beings can do with guitars.

Those are two very disparate but equally worthwhile examples.

Cliff: Absolutely. But I, I thought of that moment so early into listening to this record because I, being able to sit there and like just on a Zoom call and you’re actively identifying like, are so, you are so much better than me at music. you’re like three of my lifetimes. If I dedicated all of them to this and you’re just here like, yeah, dude, just, yeah, add the ninth.

Where would it go? Cool. Thank you. Yeah. What would a 13th sound like? What do you think you should do next? And like, to me, that approach to music and musicianship, but also the openness to like, it doesn’t have to be that serious. There’s no gatekeeping to you learning this knowledge. It’s just like, yeah, this is how I think.

If you wanna learn to play like me, this is how I think about it. And you can start thinking about it that way too, if you’d like. All of that translates. All the way down back into really interesting music that’s difficult to explain. Why is it this way? It’s because of this. It’s because like there’s an incredible walking baseline happening in every song and as a counterpoint to every moment of it, there’s an a tremendously unique chord voicing, which makes you feel like the song is familiar, but it never actually becomes fully familiar to you.

’cause it’s not that simple. man, the way that that sort of technique can just draw you along is amazing. But I think, and I’ll stop like vamping on guitar technique now, but I want to say like that in and of itself may or may not be interesting enough to make a chic there. The counterpoint then of Bernard Edwards being such a good basis and having his own techniques and approach and compositional knowledge means that together those things work Like they lock in in a different way than just like if a drummer and a bassist were really good. Something different is happening in that moment. And listening to the way that they work with each other musically throughout these songs is literally entertaining. Enlightening to me, like I learned things the more I thought about what they were doing.

so that is truly the smallest bit of like, look at all the places that Nile Rogers has touched. Like we, I haven’t even talked about other instruments, his synthesizers or his production career. I just talked about a couple of guitar techniques that have been so influential that if you look for them, you can see them in almost

every modern guitarist.

Yes. Yeah. Like I gave some extreme examples to draw it out, but like, you go listen to any jazz or blues guitarist from the last 15 to 20 years, and you can tell like actually now, okay, so now how to listen to Blues by Cliff fucking, I guess like now hopefully you can start to discern like, are they, if you want a better word than sloppy, fine.

But like, are they on the Jimi Hendrix Jimmy Page side of playing a thing? Or are you hearing intentional technique and complexity? That’s being done with purpose. Both are equally valid. Yeah. Yeah. And then because you can listen and discern that, that itself, I think opens up some more music to you.

You start to know what you’re hearing when you hear a new band that you haven’t heard before, that’ll help you categorize them and try to understand what’s coming from a guitarist especially. And that’s just one example of a thing you can do, not only with guitarist, but then like every instrument has these dimensions to them.

Kyle: do, I like the playing tighter or looser is a whole dimension. You could spend just a year of everything you’ve already liked and, and discoveries you’re trying to make. You could spend a year just on that dimension and end up 40% farther away from where you started. That’s a wonderful dimension of human expression that I think is not necessarily always intuitive to think about, but.

it does sort of signal a worldview and like a reason for being in the music world and creating that. you can start to like sort yourself a little bit rather than across genre or place of origin or whatever style, philosophical approach, adherence to rhythm, or like relationship to rhythm.

Maybe not sticking to, you know, ’cause you can get into things like swing and all that sort of stuff. investigating your own relationship to adherence to rhythm is, and challenging it is a really interesting thing to do. So you mentioned guitar and bass, that that is the fundamental dynamic at work here. Kyle and Bernard are the, the heartbeat of this thing, even though everybody plays an important role. So like the moments for me to dial in on fir first quick aside the video that I was talking about earlier as a lay person that I think really dials in on exactly what you were just explaining. You can either do the 40 minute fender live where it takes four people to explain what you just did in like 10 minutes, but they walk through some really cool examples.

The fact that it’s like a 40 minute live stream just about his guitar technique, I think starts to scratch the surface of like how important a thing that you’re dealing with.

Cliff: Invite me. Invite me,

Kyle: They seem cool. Yeah, I would like sit, I would sit in that studio and just watch people do that. That’s cool. I learned from it.

Cliff: I love that. Yeah.

Kyle: Way more important than that though, is the four minute video from the channel. Enter the Jam and the video is titled Nile Rogers teaches guitar, colon picking techniques and he shows chord phrasings, the chord progression of everybody dance, like the whole chords. And then he shows the diminished chords, maybe that’s not the right word, the selected pieces of the chords, where he, the way he actually plays it with the right hand incorporated.

And that was the first time I got a really clear appreciation for the balance of complexity of chord selection and expression. Wow, that’s not Johnny Cash, EAB, and then the way he chooses to play it, what he chooses to play and not play. So you can see a bit of that. Right hands go and left hand is making choices, which is such an inversion of the way I would’ve ever thought to think about guitar.

And then he sings the melody of everybody dance on top of it. And just the sparseness of that allows you to see the contrast. So like, if everything Cliff just went through was a little bit technical and you’re like, yeah, but I don’t, I’ve never touched a guitar. Help me explain why any of those things are important.

Just watching Miles’s hands in that Enter the Jam video is like a Oh wow. For, us visual learners. So a couple of examples from guitar and a couple of examples from Bass that I think typify the kinds of things to look for, especially as a lay person to listen for, the sort of quintessential end as much as Lay Freak is, is the Signature Sheik song.

Rightfully so. I Want Your Love, which was also a big single off. This record to me is the quintessential introductory sheik song. I think you and I have a line that salvo affair is probably the holy shit moment for both of us, but like stopping somebody on the street being like. Hey, this is Chic. You get the total package of Chic and I want your love.

You get Nile’s right hand going on the 16th. Really cleanly sitting right there in the middle nicely. You have a Bernard, I think minor key baseline that’s in the style of so many hits. It’s adjacent enough to like Sister Sludges. We are family to where you can see, like this is the stylistic sort of ecosystem that he deals in.

You know, it, feels like disco in that way, but it’s not the same exact melody. So you get like a really quintessential Bernard Edwards bassline. You get terrific female vocals, both layered and solo stuff from Alpha Anderson. I think that’s a really essential element of the Chic Mix is the female vocals that just do a more sophisticated thing than male vocals would in disco.

I mean there, there we could do a whole two hour thing on like the politics of disco and why it was so easy to malign and marginalize. And the short answer is like, so much of it is because it was led by women and queer people and other marginalized populations, but moment of appreciation for the elegance with which.

Women sort of led in this male dominated group, and there was like, obviously there’d be a strong female feminine presence, in a thing that’s trying to go beyond ego and personalities, you know, that is sort of an inherently like, matriarchal thing. So they, I think they made cool choices there, but there’s great vocals, both the solo stuff and the verses and the, the layered choral vocals of the chorus.

There’s some really elegant like piano tickles that get into like almost boogie woogie cording, or, or phrasing, like a little bit barrel house, almost like contrast that with like really sharp all note at the same time. Jazz stab things. it’s more bluesy than that. and then a Coutre mall I think you have to use a French word because it is deployed so elegantly.

And this is obviously a French ass band. I mean, there’s tubular bells on. I want you back. Shout out to Jose Rossi for Tubular bells deployed very, very subtly. Not just regular, like Handbells two very specific Tubular bell sounds and then strings to your point about like the three 20 Switch it Up phenomenon.

The Beat, the Beat Switch, this is a big beat Switch album. That string section, that middle section around three-ish minutes is killer. It’s like breathtaking because it, it brightens up the palette of the song after being sort of a straightforward driver. So there’s really steady groove that you get the sheet groove in this thing, and then an element of sophistication and, and change and multitudes, and it’s like half instrumental, it’s a six minute song or so, and like fully three minutes of it has no vocal.

So it goes on forever. It goes up and down and all around and you know, stacks up. Interestingly, it goes horizontal and vertical. It’s a great three dimensions of chic song. The total package is there. Then the, the sort of like Stretch Nile where you think about Producer Nile, like Hired Gun Nile comes in in Voir Affair, which is the third song on the record, right?

Cliff: Yep.

Kyle: and Savoir Affair to me is where you can audibly hear. Interesting chord phrasings. And then in the lead lines, you hear cool bent, single notes, just like cool, weird, jazzy, almost city pop stuff happening. What’s his face? Taaka? Um, Mai Taaka is having this big moment where he like is touring and playing the surfboard guitar and whatever.

So if you like city pop, come back home to Chic and if you like Swar affairs specifically, maybe go explore Japanese city pop. ’cause there is a, there’s an international, cosmopolitan elegance to Sav warfare. And a lot of that I think is because of the guitar choices that Nile makes. And then on the bass front, my God, is this a bass record?

This is the bass record to end all base records, man, like up there with a Bootsy p Funk type situation or the meters or there’s no base record that sounds quite like this base record from Bernard Edwards. to me, the number one, I’d be interested for your top base line, base track to me, the number one on this is Happy Man, where he is walking it up and down.

The whole time. It’s just a delight. It’s a cornucopia of flavors and notes that he’s doing. It’s very active, but it’s never overly naughty. It just, texturally feels so good, the whole song and it’s tight. he never misses like he always on beat. and then Funny Bone, which I have a soft spot for after being put on by old friend Monica.

that’s where you really get the funk, the like,

um, where there’s the push pull, not quite slap, but sort of in that, sly is that Larry Stewart vein. And then on Atlas I am Free is where you get a little bit Bernard Edwards contrast of the, like, almost Jocko, higher on the fretboard, more melodic than textural, kind of a lead instrument type of situation.

So he, Bernard has versatility on this thing as well. And there’s all sorts of other moments, the saxophone on. Sometimes you win that. That’s like the crazy, another crazy three minute moment. There’s like little church chords on the piano. There’s electric piano and some roads buried in this thing.

You can almost take Tony Thompson for granted the whole record in the 120 BPM pocket. And like if I had one complaint about the production of this record, it’s that the drums don’t hit hard enough. But like there’s so much other stuff happening that it’s very gentlemanly of Tony Thompson to just keep the beat and always make it work.

You gotta work kind of hard to really concentrate in on the drums ‘ cause there’s so much rhythmic work happening on the other instruments. But like, shout out to Tony Thompson and then there’s, I’m in the Cliff camp where I like don’t care about the vocals on this. Most of the time it like encourages you to participate.

Feels like the function of the vocals a lot of the time. But there are moments like on Happy Man, which is like a top three on this record for me. When they do home and harmonize on the bent note and that is a super sick move on the standalone chorus. I think it’s the only thing that they harmonize like that.

Cool. Just like. That’s a move that’s got voir affair. Voir affair is really like the essence of this record, not just as a song, but the philosophy of it. It’s just this is a swaggy record and it comes out in little sophisticated touches like that. Are there any other little moments that delighted you and don’t forget to answer the baseline question.

Cliff: I haven’t forgotten. It’s definitely I want your Love It is itself an earworm. I’m singing the baseline all the time.

It rules also inside of that song, another moment I mentioned like about three minutes and 20 seconds being like an oddly recurring timestamp. So there’s this like weird horn section that comes out of nowhere in that moment and melodically does something surprising and it’s fun because once again, it’s one of those, okay, we’ve determined it’s definitely intentional moments at specific like time sequences throughout the music.

They know that they’re doing something a little unexpected or unusual or whatever, but it does such a good job of throwing you slightly off balance at exactly the point where you might go, all right, I got it. All right, I get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. And then it’s like, wait a minute. The, we haven’t even crested what we can do with this riff yet. Like you’re not even close to done dancing. We have a lot more to play and we have a lot more ideas that we haven’t even introduced, and that draws out the power of a baseline man when it’s that groovy and it can go on and on like that and be played off of so well.

It’s truly incredible. I’d also add, before I make my way back to the Swar Fair, just really quickly, I would say at last I am free, grew on me so much more than I ever expected. This church ass song sounded annoying to me. Probably my least favorite thing when I was initially listening to it. And now it’s one of my favorites.

It’s a hook. I sing it all the time. And something about how at the very end of that song, it’s just kind of like basic piano setting, number one. And they just kind of play it out. I’m like, it’s such an undramatic way to finish the song that otherwise kind of felt sweeping and dramatic the entire time.

And balance of like some sort of musical lightheartedness is so endearing to me on this record and never expected to like those aspects so much.

Kyle: is such an interesting song on the record because you know, if you’re Atlantic Records, you want Sheik to give you eight le freaks,

Right.

You just want. Keep ’em in the club for the full 45 minutes. and that’s a like go to the bathroom, go get a drink type song.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: But the really interesting thing about that song to me is it’s got a whole other set of chords after you think it should resolve.

Like they play four or six or eight things and then they play four more and you’re like, well hold on start over. You’re using too many. But it works. It’s a smart almost proggy thing. And then they use it in like, to your point, a church way. And then once they introduce that pattern a couple of times, then Nile starts arpeggiating out those chords and you get some of that nice and really pretty clean guitar tone.

That song reminds me a little, just a little of another song that you and I didn’t expect to, like when we listened to the record and that’s Mermaid off of Love Deluxe, where we, we were like, what is this smooth jazz B 98.5? Shit. But it’s so great and it works. And I think it’s the same thing. It’s weird chords and dreamlike state.

I guess it’s a bit cocteau twins in that way too, where you’re like, it all feels a little strange. It all feels like five degrees off from where maybe should be, but it’s because they’re introducing something really novel and they commit to it and and they do it really well.

Cliff: Yep. And Long, that’s the longest song on the record with like the most minimum amount of lyrics being repeated over and over again. But even, even lyrically, that song’s interesting because the AtLast I Am Free Line is the only positive line in the song and it keeps you feeling like it’s a triumphant song, which is why I’ve come to like so much of the church ass music of it.

’cause like it sounds like a vamp that you’re doing while we’re taking the offering sometimes, it’s not actually an encouraging or aspirational message. It’s sort of like, I’m fucking tired done with this shit. And so like that swirl of things. Fascinating to hide on this

Kyle: And that song kind of moves the least of all of the songs. I mean, I know it’s got that sort of middle part where it punches up. It feels sort of like a key change. But not real. Like she takes the vocals up some. but yeah, it sort of swirls around the same thing, which makes it an outlier on this record.

You know, that’s full of songs with lots of really distinctive ideas keep things moving and moving and moving. So to swirl around and stasis for a bit is, is an interesting but probably necessary move. The record probably wouldn’t repeat all as well without a little bit of a pallet cleanser like that.

Cliff: Totally. So just to point at it directly though, please, please go back and listen to So War On Purpose actively. If there is any inkling of interest in any of the Guitar Shed that we talked about, please, please listen to this composition. Not only are we saying it’s incredible, but like Nile talks about it as one of his best compositional accomplishments on an instrument.

And if you are curious about what it means to use phrasing as an instrument and tell a story with a guitar, it is straight up some of the best guitar playing I am aware of on an intentional song. Anywhere on planet Earth, it’s incredibly specifically composed. It’s interesting.

And if you need to go to a specific point, because you know, we can’t just literally play the entire song in the middle of this podcast, like around two minutes and 13 seconds in, he starts running on the guitar in a way that it is a payoff from what you’ve listened to so far. But it, once again, sort of like the, like surprising horns and noises and stuff that’s come in at that moment, he goes, actually, let’s go over here a little bit.

And if you allow yourself to listen to it, you don’t have to understand it musically to feel him going, come over here, we’re gonna use a slightly different rhythm now and a different way of interacting with this melody over and over again. And so like, it reminds me of like famous guitar songs, like since I’ve Been Loving You.

So there’s the Zeppelin, Bing go-kart, like songs where the guitar is talking and you are listening to it for a while. but also it reminded me at the same time then speaking of voodoo of Spanish joint,

Kyle: oh yeah.

Cliff: shit. Oh, they’re killing it. Okay. Like it has that vibe to me of like, kind of like

all the studio musicians.

Kyle: My God. Yeah.

Cliff: Yeah.

but like also that vibe though of like, there’s no elitism, but you can almost feel all the studio musicians dead panning the camera. Like, don’t you fucking forget who you’re talking to? We got one of these and we put it on the record. And Swar fair is, to your point number three, it’s just like, put that thing up there right after two singles.

So just not just contextually a great song, but truly like, if I were teaching a course on guitar, this song would probably be in there.

Kyle: The way that you are talking about it as a guitar song makes me think of Little Wing. if I were teaching a course on guitar, that’d be another one that it’s like composition feel. All of that comes together in like a perfect little nugget. And I’d contrast that with the song Maggot Brain, where like feel takes over and it’s a big spacious thing.

Little Wing and Swar affair. There’s a tight compositional journey that they stay within. That’s part cord work, part lead lines, uh, and they go in and out of them. there’s a technical competency element as well.

and that’s a great, if you want like exact points of the contrast of feel versus technicality stuff that you’re talking about, that spectrum of Hendricks and Paige versus a Nile Rogers or like a jazz player.

Those two songs would like typify the same thing in those two styles.

Cliff: Yep. Man, what a fun idea. Yes. Those two songs on a spectrum. Then maybe since I’ve been loving you on one side and John Coltrane’s Giant Steps on the other, like that sort of wild intentionality in both cases, but with completely different feels and outcomes.

So I find myself at the end of plenty of talking about this record staring at a million other things I’d like to talk about. So what I could do instead I think, is maybe use the, what should we listen to next as an avenue for at least one of those. so that I don’t become insufferable to myself or others.

Kyle: I was born in that darkness, of me being insufferable, not you being insufferable to me to be clear. Yeah. Uh, who do you want to

Cliff: You merely

Kyle: You can hit pause at any time. I’m stuck in this brain.

Cliff: So if that’s an okay prompt. I think what I could do is touch on really quickly a few things I’ve enjoyed from here, which is the Niles Roger or Nile Rogers. It will always be hard to not say Nile

Kyle: I know. Oh, and especially when you start doing not, and I, Ellie apostrophe s you do a few of those and then you start pluralizing all over the place.

Cliff: You know

Kyle: Hopefully we’ve paid enough respect at this point that we can occasionally biff it in the midst of our excitement.

Cliff: for sure. Following his then prolific production career is one of a thousand things we could, should, maybe would’ve said in this podcast episode

Kyle: You can totally do the, what was that, the Neptunes playlist that we made? You could totally just find a, like Nile Rogers on the beat playlist and it would last and honestly, sight unseen, you could put it on and it would rip for a party.

Cliff: Yeah, totally. Totally. And there is a playlist I’ve found pretty quickly on Spotify that covers some pretty good ones, um, from production. Now, one thing to mention before I say the explicit production bits in Case your brain didn’t already know this or didn’t put these pieces together, like just, you can go listen to Get Lucky by Daft Punk now, and now you know who’s playing guitar, even if you didn’t before.

Now you get it. Now you hear it. It’s the same. And that there’s a reason why they locked him in for that and why a lot of those songs are really cool on that record. you know, that’s him literally playing okay. But it’s hard to even give a harbor tour of this. But like for instance, uh, his compositional skills came out to play with he made the Soul Glow jingle from Coming to America.

That’s him He did a bunch of really cool random shit like that. But then he also went on to, right, you, you mentioned earlier, uh, revitalization of David, David Bowie. So he produced Let’s Dance by David Bowie. Madonna’s like a Virgin. And then some, if you feel like disco is locked in time, this phrase will be too Duran Duran.

Uh, he did a lot of work with them in nx s and stuff too, which all very cool, especially in its moment. And like, there is just so much that’s been produced by, influenced by, uh, he contributed to, he played on someone else he knew, played on whatever, was all a part of or related to his production and compositional skills that he was as he would go on after sheik’s existence and everything else.

and so, I’m specifically recommending this avenue because I wouldn’t have thought myself to recommend that avenue that’s gonna lead you to, a whole bunch of pop songs, some of which you’ll be very familiar with. That’s one of my least favorite moves in this case. It’s fun. it’s, to me, even better or better in my way, um, than the sort of Neptunes, let me listen to the way that they produce music thing.

This is, this becomes like a let’s go across decades and through time to see what this dude decided to put his finger on the scale for and then go appreciate those individual songs and how intertwined they are. And I’ve just, I think I’ve enjoyed the fact that, you know, we, me and you were born a few years after sheik’s existence basically.

And so the Nile Rogers production era is ish my life. So I, I’ll remember a lot of it. It’s interesting. The progression makes sense to me. And so I found that to be like an, a surprisingly interesting way to explore what I got outta Sheik. And yes, I personally am over-indexing on Nile Rogers, the guitarist.

I’m sorry, I’m fascinated. I’m not tired of thinking about him or his impact after doing it for months now.

Kyle: One, I think anyone that listens to this probably also really likes guitar music and has some orientation to guitar music. And this is a specific and different flavor than the kind of guitar work that we normally go for. That’s a very satisfying world unto itself for a really, really, really long time with a huge amount of breath.

So, don’t think there’s any need to apolo. Nobody who likes music is going to need you to apologize for being like, I’m really into Nile Rogers and everything that he’s done, it could do a lot worse.

Cliff: No, that’s true.

Kyle: That’s a great hole. Were there any others for you?

Cliff: I will share the other rabbit hole that I looked at, but have not yet done anything with. We mentioned it briefly earlier. It’s hilarious that this became like a, oops. We should make sure and say that on the episode thing. being a little facetious, they more or less started hip hop with good times, uh, arguably literally did. And that speaks to so much of what we’ve talked about, including the like base expertise of Bernard Edwards and the grooviness of the whole thing. Like there’s a reason why an entire genre of music was launched on, now this dude plays guitar or bass and then you’re not just gonna hear it in, you know, sugar Hill Gang or whatever.

Like, you’re also gonna hear it in another one Bites the Dust. ’cause that is effectively an intentional interpolation of his style of playing. and okay, now we’re going further, but point in all that being like the genesis of a launching what became hip hop in a moment where there are a million things to say here, but one is the strength of the bass, guitar, and rhythm and what that means and what it can create.

But I think, you know, a another thing we could have gone into here as a moment in time, but chose to reference and drive by instead a bit is like Disco ended more or less for cultural kind of backlash ish reasons. Again, we’ve talked about this on other episodes before, a little bit more in depth, you know, for many people, especially who were in disco bands, they experienced this more or less as actual racism because in a lot of time, uh, in a lot of ways, that’s where that came from. That said, I am really delighted by the idea that people wanted to kill disco for even partially bad reasons, and inadvertently created hip hop and dance music instead.

Good fucking job, man. Like you made Kendrick possible. Thank you. Great work. Thanks for blowing up, literally those disco records at a fucking baseball stadium and causing a panic. So that, and now we have NA’s Illmatic. Thank you.

Kyle: playing at the Super Bowl on a similar field, eat shit nerds.

Cliff: It

Kyle: Carleigh has a shirt that says Disco doesn’t suck. You just can’t dance. And I think about it all the time,

Cliff: that’s so

Kyle: you wouldn’t wanna blow up disco records if you weren’t a no dancing ass bitch.

Cliff: N-D-A-B-I call them. Yep.

A two.

Kyle: think there are two strains for me on this. One is revisiting Cornerstone Artist and two is instrument rabbit holes. So probably very similar

when you’re chasing the rabbit, like people like us are like, certainly for me, the tendency is always to go out and find more and more and more artists rather than going deep on one artist that you already feel like you should know, you know, and have grown up, should have grown up with that sort of thing.

And that gets harder and harder as you get older. Like if you missed them, it kind of feels like you missed them forever sometimes. But one of the really fun things about getting older is you can just decide, I’m only sort of into prints. I’m gonna make Prince my whole personality for a year. And you find the like 84 tour bootlegs and that’s like all you listen to, you load it up onto a burnt CD and drive around in your car and just listen to very obscure princes.

And that’s sort of top of mind for me because the 10th anniversary of Prince’s death just happened. And so people were surfacing really interesting DJ mixes of obscure stuff and he’s got more material than any human. Like you could be a Prince scholar as your job and still barely scratch the surface or fail to contextualize it for the vast majority of people.

Questlove functions as one of pop culture’s greatest Prince Scholars at large and he did a playlist of 200 Prince songs. So that’s the other thing about like some of these big artists is it’s really easy to be intimidated by the great wall of work and the impossibility of climbing it. And that’s why entry points, that’s why we still love this album format.

Like here’s one little nuclear digestible unit of art to interact with. Start here. Might be right or wrong, but we’ve gotten really psyched about it and here it is for you and you can go anywhere from there. Sheik is a good reminder to just like pick one of those big artists and go for it and just like be all about them or if you loved them a long time ago to rediscover them and interact with all the new things you’ve learned about music in life.

And so the handful that have come up a lot in this podcast, but like also come up in the orbit tangentially of Nile and Chic Bowie is one that you just named. So I think there’s a lot about like the cosmopolitan, artsy aesthetic identity reinvention thing that’s really cool. Bowie has also been gone, I believe, 10 years.

I think we lost Lemi Bowie Prince all the same year. So Bowie and Prince would be like two of the biggies. Stevie Wonder, when I think about like crazy chord shit and pop music, I think about Stevie Wonder. So he’s always one go beyond songs in the key of life, go beyond Innervisions, go beyond talking book, get into plantation and a backup stream to music of my mind and crazy live stuff and whatever.

And Stevie’s drumming, all that stuff sly for a, a number of dimensions, sly and the Family Stone is a great analog here. One of those things is Larry Graham’s very inventive, slap base playing. But Sly like Chic is one of the probably most underappreciated, another place where like Questlove has done Yeoman’s work to help recontextualize the artists for modern time.

So there’s a great new Sly documentary from the last year or two, and Jimmy fucking Hendrix man, I’ll go. I think two or three years sometimes without like really doing a lot of Hendrix listening, you know, I’ll have like a Hendrix on a barbecue playlist. I’ll play manic depression at the dive bar jukebox ’cause it’s a perfect sounding jam or red house depending on how late in the night it is.

The Atlanta International pop, the Atlanta International Pop Festival, 1970 version of Red House, which to me is the best

Cliff: the

Kyle: one of that. Yeah. but like, also, and I think, I think I sent this to you pretty recently, machine gun pe people have been talking about band of gypsies and specifically the couple of recordings that exist of machine gun and how that’s maybe the best guitar recording ever. So if you take Peak Nile Rogers in the one direction, Pete Jimi Hendrix in the other direction is probably machine gun with the band of gypsies. But love it or hate it, the estate is still releasing notes that Jimi Hendrix put on tape to one degree of care or another. But he’s always worth revisiting.

And like the older I get, the more I feel like he is not only one of the most important musical figures of the 20th century, but like maybe one of the most important Americans who lived period. he’s the lightning bolt of American culture. He’s, he’s the, the moment where it all changed. You know, he like all past, present and future all lives through Jimi Hendrix.

You’re really into Artemis two and the possibility of space travel and science and all that, like Jimi Hendrix in the 1969 of it all is right back in that same moment as well. I’m sure everybody who, who listens to this podcast already likes Jimi Hendrix, but like Reapp appreciating any of those cats who were like singular and other worldly and really moved the ball really fucking far downfield and continue to years and years and years past in many cases their lives period.

but certainly past their prime output. So then the two things, obviously guitar and bass, but specific things with each, with guitar. I’m not normally a clean tone guy. Just going after and hounding different flavors of clean tone guitar here. So my personal favorite clean tone guitarist, short-lived young man, Steve Gaines of Crawdad and Lynyrd Skynyrd, a great oaky picker.

And I think a lot of the ones that I’m gonna touch on are really more in the country influenced vein. But there’s some great jazz cats too. So Steve Gaines is one, when you talk about clean tone, if you’re not talking about Nile Rogers, you’re probably talking about Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits. Another great example of just precision playing. I mean, you could spend a whole night just watching people do play throws of sultans of swing, and the best guitarists in the world can’t play it as precisely and as swingy as Mark ler. Glen Campbell, one of the greats, west Montgomery, one of the greats. And shout out to our buddy Steve West, the, the great photographer and artisan who originally put me onto West Montgomery.

it’s one of my favorite cassettes in my truck, is the incredible jazz guitar of West Montgomery. That is a,

Cliff: I was gonna ask if that’s the one. Yep.

Kyle: a, that’s a fun pickup truck cassette. With just, it still plays very cleanly, even with an only mid-range stock forward. Speakers, uh, Roy Buchanan, great clean tone. Telly player, the guys in Poco.

All influenced by Roy Buchanan being a good downstream example of that. Jerry Reed, who did some cool ply things around clean tone, but man was a hell of a picker. Chad Atkins, as we mentioned, Steve Cropper, maybe a little in that vein, but could get kind of crunchy in his work as well. Bass how low can you go?

funk base of different flavors. you know, you could go upstream to Bernard’s influences and enjoy like a James Jamerson, the true goat of the instrument in American music. Uh, you know, he’s on all the Motown stuff. Jerry, Jim or Jamat, uh, the Atlantic Records session guy already mentioned. Larry Graham of Sly and the Family Stone.

I remember reading a thing where Bernard Edwards talked about the Brothers Johnson specifically Lewis Thunder, thumbs Johnson watching them side stage and being like, how is he doing that? so if you’ve got a cat like Bernard Edwards being like, how is he doing that? they’re pretty great.

he also cited Rufuss Rufuss and Chaka Khan sort of in the same way. Also on that list, I would put George Porter of the meters, obviously, Bootsy Collins, Rocco Prestia of Tower of Power, Paul Jackson of the Mighty Head, hunters, Herbie Hancock, and the head hunters. that’s maybe an interesting place to go from here.

That’s a great mix of jazz and funk. And sort of a third thing that’s distinctive to a group of people getting down, Willie Weeks, who played with Donny Hathaway would be another basis. and then I got a shout out. Jamay Stuart Zender being a more recent example, and like all of those cats, the only person that I can think of.

That’s like remotely that funky, that’s like a, right now, right now artist is Thundercat. So knowing that that’s an ecosystem of people, everyone that I just named, that I’m very into and I’m a huge bass fan and as I get older I become even more of a bass fan. ’cause we grew up in the south with funk and soul and church music and rap and all that.

So anybody who has good bass recommendations that aren’t Berkeley music people butter, funky and good and distinct, I’d love to know. That’s a whole bunch of folks that, that’s that between the two of us, that’s hours and hours and hours and hours of music. And I, I would say like more than ever, it’s like, pick one and stay on them for a month and just only do that thing live with the reps. You will be so gratified by just living with the reps of the funk and the groove.

Cliff: And if you find yourself not liking something, make an intentional choice in another direction. Tie this to what we were talking about earlier. This is how you stave off the computer led future, right? Do you wanna listen to this mush? No, baby. No. You need to listen to West Montgomery, okay? You need to listen to Thundercat.

You need to learn why you would listen to them, even if you never have to verbalize it to anybody else so that you can learn how to listen to the next thing. You got to do it, baby. Don’t listen to that AI slot. Don’t do it.

This is me being loving.

Kyle: nobody says it better than the final words on the record. The whole world’s a circus. Don’t you be a clown.