Nile Rodgers was co-founder of the CHIC Organization alongside bassist Bernard Edwards.
CHIC’s multi-million-selling hits of the late 1970s included the likes of Le Freak, I Want Your Love, Everybody Dance, Dance Dance Dance, My Forbidden Love and Good Times.
Bernard Edward’s bass line from Good Times was sampled for seminal hip-hop track Rapper’s Delight by The Sugar Hill Gang.
Rodgers has sold over 500 million albums and 75 million singles worldwide across his work with CHIC and his productions for artists such as David Bowie (Let’s Dance), Diana Ross (diana), Sister Sledge (We Are Family), and Madonna (Like A Virgin).
He has also worked with artists like Duran Duran, INXS, Mick Jagger, Grace Jones, Steve Winwood, Peter Gabriel, The B-52s, and Michael Jackson.
In recent years, Rodgers has worked with contemporary super star artists from Daft Punk and Avicii to Sigala, Disclosure, and Sam Smith.
Nile Rodgers & CHIC most recently released their first new studio album, “It’s About Time” in over 26 years to critical acclaim and a Top 10 position in the UK album charts.
Rodgers is a multiple Grammy Award winner, a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Chairman of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, an Ivor Novello winner, an Honorary Doctor of Music at Berklee College of Music and Chief Creative Adviser at Abbey Road Studios.
In an interview with MBW in April 2020, Rodgers was asked what the best piece of advice he’s ever been given and who from, to which he explained the following:
“I had a very strict jazz guitar tutor, and he told me that any song in the Top 40 is a great composition. I said are you kidding me?! I started singing Sugar, Sugar by The Archies and I said, ‘You call that a great composition?’ He said, ‘Absolutely’.
“I asked him, ‘Why would would you say something so absurd?’ He said, ‘Oh, you think that’s absurd? That record has been No. 1 for three or four weeks now. Are you telling me that those millions and millions of people who put it there are wrong, and you, Nile Rodgers, are right?’
“As an artist, your main job is to communicate with people.”
Nile Rodgers
He added: “What he was saying was that as an artist, your main job is to communicate with people. And at that time, Sugar, Sugar was doing that better than any other record.
“Two weeks later I wrote Everybody Dance.”Music Business Worldwide