Bernard Edwards built the bass line. The rest of music just moved in.
In the late 1970s, when disco critics were busy dismissing the genre as shallow, Edwards was inside the Power Station in New York City doing something that musicians across every genre would spend the next four decades trying to replicate. As co-founder of Chic alongside guitarist Nile Rodgers, Edwards' signature bass grooves, characterized by precise, melodic funk lines, propelled Chic's commercial success and shaped the sound of late-1970s dance music. That sentence is accurate and still somehow undersells the thing. Edwards was the bassist, the co-writer, the co-producer, and the room's low-end conscience, all at once.
Born in Greenville, North Carolina, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Edwards met guitarist Nile Rodgers in the early 1970s while both were working as musicians in the Sesame Street touring theatrical show. Two men shaping the sound of an era, finding each other on the road behind a children's television program. The band's debut album, Chic (1977), featured the hit "Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)," and their follow-up C'est Chic (1978) included massive hits like "Le Freak," which reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and "I Want Your Love," which peaked at number seven. Their single "Everybody Dance," released in April 1978 from the debut album, became a disco staple in its own right. The pace of that output is staggering. Two albums, multiple charting singles, a sound fully formed and fully theirs, in less than two years.
The technique behind all of it was singular. Hits like "Good Times," "Le Freak," and "Everybody Dance," as well as the Chic-produced "We Are Family" and "I'm Coming Out," were grounded by Edwards' "chucking" bass technique, where he emulated holding a pick and then struck the strings with both nail and finger. Rodgers described it in plain terms: "He played with his forefinger and thumb, like he was holding a pick. The strength of the low-end came from his thumb on top and the other three fingers curled up underneath, so he'd strike the string with the bottom and top of his finger. He had the fattest pick you could ever imagine!" The result was a tone that sat between a plucked note and a struck one, warm and percussive at the same time, something that felt like it was pushing the song from behind and pulling the listener forward simultaneously. Relentless eighth- and 16th-note octaves were the disco norm at the time, but Edwards employed the octave as a stylish flourish, treating it as color rather than wallpaper.
"Le Freak" is the famous story, and it deserves its fame. The 1978 hit from the album C'est Chic was written on New Year's Eve 1977, after Grace Jones invited Bernard and Nile Rodgers to Studio 54. They were refused entry, so they bought some champagne and went round the corner to Rodgers' place to celebrate and jam instead. Out of that frustration came one of the best-selling singles in Atlantic Records history. But the record that carries the full weight of what Edwards was capable of is "Good Times," from 1979. Written and produced by Edwards and Nile Rodgers, it became one of the most genre-defying and influential grooves in the history of recorded music. While it originally hit the top of the charts with Chic in 1979, staying at number one for six weeks, the song and Edwards' bass line quickly exceeded the world of disco and funk when The Sugarhill Gang used it as the basis for "Rapper's Delight." Hip-hop's commercial arrival ran on an engine Edwards built. Furthermore, the iconic three-note phrase that begins the groove also inspired "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen, released the following year. Edwards, for his part, was clear-eyed about the racial dimension of the confusion that followed. He complained that the music press thought Chic had lifted the line from Queen: "Can you believe that? Good Times came out more than a year before, but it was inconceivable to these people that black musicians could possibly be innovative like that. It was just these dumb disco guys ripping off this rock song." The record shows otherwise, and it has shown otherwise for forty-five years.
Beyond Chic's own catalog, Edwards and Rodgers took their operation into the studio for other artists with the same precision they brought to their own work. The We Are Family album by Sister Sledge was recorded between August and November 1978 at the Power Station in New York City, with Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards as producers. The album was entirely written, produced, and arranged by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards. Every note of "He's the Greatest Dancer," every turn of "Lost in Music," every lift in the title track, runs through Edwards' hands. "We Are Family" peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the R&B chart. As a session bassist, Edwards also played on records by Paul Simon, Mick Jagger, Joe Cocker, and Rod Stewart, as well as projects that Nile Rodgers produced, including David Bowie's Let's Dance and Madonna's Like a Virgin. The man's fingerprints are on records that defined four separate decades of popular music.
Edwards died of pneumonia in April 1996 after performing with Chic at Tokyo's Budokan Arena. He was honored posthumously in 2005 with his induction into the Dance Music Hall of Fame. In 2016, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame alongside longtime collaborator Nile Rodgers, celebrating their joint songwriting credits on hits like "Le Freak" and "Good Times." Chic has not yet been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but has been nominated eleven times, making them the most nominated act in Hall of Fame history. That number tells you everything about the gap between what the music did and what the institution has been willing to say about it. Edwards built the groove that launched hip-hop, fed rock and roll's most durable bass riff, and produced some of the most joyful and structurally sophisticated dance records ever made. The credit has been slow to arrive. The music has never waited for it.
