The Bassline That Built Three Genres at Once

Bernard Edwards played the bass line for “Good Times” in June 1979 at Power Station in New York City, and by the end of that same year it had already been lifted wholesale for the first commercially successful hip-hop single in history. By 1980 it had seeded a Queen record that would go to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. By the time the decade closed, the groove Edwards laid down on a Music Man StingRay in four days of tracking had touched funk, pop, rock, and rap in ways that no single piece of music had any right to do. That is the story of Bernard Edwards: a man whose instrument was the protagonist, whose basslines were the argument, and whose name most people still do not know as well as they should.

Edwards was born in Greenville, North Carolina in 1952 and grew up in Brooklyn, where he met guitarist Nile Rodgers in 1970. The two came up together through New York’s jazz and funk underground, eventually forming the Big Apple Band before remaking themselves as Chic in 1977. What they built was something they called “sophisto-funk”: dense, intricate chord voicings hidden inside grooves so infectious that the complexity slid right past the listener’s defenses. Their production philosophy had a name too. Rodgers and Edwards called it DHM, Deep Hidden Meaning, the idea that every song had to carry a significance beneath its surface, that you had to understand the DNA of a track and see it from multiple angles before it was finished. That discipline showed up most clearly in the bass.

Edwards’s approach was melodic in a way that most disco bassists never attempted. Where the genre’s conventions asked for a locked-in low end that served the kick drum and stayed out of the way, Edwards wrote bass lines that became the central hook of the song. You could hum them. You could follow them the way you’d follow a lead vocal. “Everybody Dance,” from Chic’s 1977 debut, opens with a four-bar bass theme that announces itself before anything else arrives. “I Want Your Love,” from C’est Chic in 1978, runs its bass through the kind of melodic arc that a horn section would envy. And then came “Good Times,” from the 1979 album Risqué, which Bass Player Magazine would eventually vote the greatest bass line ever recorded, placing it above Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Queen. The rhythm section that produced it was three people: Edwards on bass, Nile Rodgers on rhythm guitar, and Tony Thompson on drums, a Ludwig kit locked in at 112 BPM in E minor. Thompson had been recruited by Rodgers and Edwards after his work with LaBelle, and his four-on-the-floor precision gave Edwards the floor he needed to move.

The reach of “Good Times” is almost absurd to trace. Three months after its release, the Sugarhill Gang used Edwards’s bass line as the rhythmic foundation for “Rapper’s Delight,” the first rap song to become a mainstream hit. Rodgers and Edwards filed suit against Sugar Hill Records in January 1980, and the case eventually settled with royalty payments and a writing credit on all future pressings of the record. Then there was Queen’s John Deacon, who, as Edwards himself told NME, “spent some time hanging out with us at our studio.” Deacon took the intervallic structure of the “Good Times” opening phrase, shifted it to E minor, adjusted the rhythm slightly, and wrote “Another One Bites the Dust,” which went to number one in 1980. Duran Duran’s bassist John Taylor, who would later work directly with Edwards in the supergroup the Power Station, has named Edwards as his primary influence and performs the “Good Times” line regularly during solo performances. One bass line, three genres, and a direct lineage into the most commercially successful rock act of the early eighties.

What made the Chic rhythm section so transferable was exactly what made it feel so specific. Rodgers and Edwards kept the production lean. As producers, they used keyboard and string embellishments economically, which kept the weight on the rhythm. The result was a sound that could be extracted, looped, sampled, or emulated without losing its essential character, because the essential character lived in the groove itself. This was also the reason the Chic Organization’s outside productions hit as hard as the Chic records. Sister Sledge’s We Are Family, recorded at Power Station between August and November 1978 and released in January 1979, was written, produced, and arranged entirely by Rodgers and Edwards. Thompson played drums on every track. “He’s the Greatest Dancer” reached number nine on the Billboard Hot 100. The title track reached number two. “Lost in Music” hit number one on the disco chart. The album that contained all three was the same band, the same room, the same philosophy, just with a different set of voices out front.

Edwards died in Tokyo on April 18, 1996, at forty-three years old, from pneumonia, the morning after performing with Chic at the Budokan Arena. He had insisted on playing the show despite being ill. The music he left behind has generated, by Rodgers’s own accounting, billions of dollars across samples, productions, and licensing over the decades since. Chic has been calculated as the most sampled band in history, a distinction that belongs in large part to the bass lines Edwards wrote and recorded in a four-day window at Power Station in 1979. Hip-hop built its first commercial architecture on his groove. Rock borrowed his opening phrase and took it to number one. Pop producers from Diana Ross to Madonna to David Bowie ran their records through the machine he and Rodgers had built together. The genre that supposedly died in 1979 turned out to be the blueprint for everything that followed, and the man who drew the blueprint played the bass.