Chic recorded Risqué at the Power Station in New York City in 1979, and the album sounds the way it does because of one foundational decision: Bernard Edwards' bass is not the rhythm section. It is the song. Every other element on the record — Nile Rodgers' chopped guitar, Tony Thompson's drums, the string arrangements conducted by Gene Orloff, the vocals of Alfa Anderson and Luci Martin — orbits a bassline that sings, argues, and narrates. That structural choice, held across all seven tracks, is what makes Risqué the most coherent and musically serious album Chic ever made.
The evidence opens the record immediately. "Good Times," the first track and the lead single, was written by Rodgers the morning they recorded it — Edwards arrived at the Power Station a little late, and the band was already running the chart when he picked up his bass and walked in. What happened next is studio legend. Engineer Bob Clearmountain, then a young talent who would go on to become one of the great mixing engineers of the next four decades, was at the board when Edwards laid down the line. "I turned to him and said, 'Where did you come up with that amazing bass line?'" Clearmountain later recalled to Tape Op. "He turned to me and said, 'Oh, you like that?' Like he didn't know." Fonzi Thornton, who sang on numerous Chic records during this period, described his first hearing of the groove as "almost scary, because it was so new." The line runs in E minor at 110 beats per minute, built on syncopated 16th-note anticipations and a rolling chromatic climb that makes the whole thing feel like it is always arriving somewhere. It is a melody. It just happens to be played on a bass.
Edwards' technique was the reason the line could carry that weight. He had been a guitarist before he came to bass, and he never fully let go of the approach. As Rodgers explained to Bass Player magazine, Edwards played with his forefinger and thumb as though he were holding a pick — but he refused to actually use one. The result was what became known as his "chucking" technique: a percussive fingerstyle that combined the attack of a pick with the warmth of flesh, producing a tone that was simultaneously punchy and round. Relentless eighth- and 16th-note octaves were the disco norm at the time, and Edwards understood that norm well enough to move past it. His lines used the octave as a stylish flourish rather than a structural crutch, and his relationship to space — what he chose not to play — was as deliberate as anything he did play. "My basslines are usually a reaction to his guitar rhythms," Edwards told Bass Player in 1992. Rodgers clarified the dynamic later: "He wouldn't start playing bass until I came up with something that he liked. If he played along, I knew the song was going to be cool because Bernard was ten times hipper than everyone else."
The Power Station was the right room for all of this. The studio had opened in 1977, converted from a Consolidated Edison power transformer building on West 53rd Street in Manhattan, and its large live room gave drums and bass a physical presence that smaller facilities couldn't match. Clearmountain's engineering let Thompson's kick and Edwards' low end lock together without either swallowing the other, which is why the rhythm section on Risqué sounds so open even at full density. The string arrangements, with Cheryl Hong, Karen Milne, and Karen Karlsrud in the ensemble directed by Orloff, were recorded to sit above that foundation rather than fill it — a production philosophy that kept the record from ever feeling cluttered. Rodgers and Edwards had been refining this approach across two prior albums, the self-titled 1977 debut and 1978's C'est Chic, but Risqué is where the architecture became fully visible. The orchestration on "My Forbidden Lover" and "My Feet Keep Dancing" is lush without being heavy, because the bass already holds the center of gravity.
The "Good Times" bassline's afterlife is the clearest measure of what Edwards built. The Sugarhill Gang interpolated it almost verbatim for "Rapper's Delight" later that same year, a settlement eventually crediting Edwards and Rodgers as co-writers. Queen's John Deacon, who was reportedly present at the Power Station during some of the Risqué sessions, used the line's three-note opening phrase as the foundation for "Another One Bites the Dust" in 1980. Blondie, the Bee Gees, and dozens of hip-hop producers across the following decade all pulled from the same well. Rolling Stone placed Risqué at number 414 on their 2020 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and "Good Times" itself sits at number 68 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs. Those rankings are not the point. The point is that the bassline traveled further and into more genres than almost any single recorded performance in the history of American popular music — and it was improvised the morning it was recorded, by a man who arrived at the studio late.
Risqué reached number five on the Billboard 200 and number two on the US R&B chart, going platinum on the strength of three singles. But the chart positions describe the commercial surface of a record whose real achievement was structural. Edwards and Rodgers built a production philosophy at the Power Station that treated the bass as the primary melodic voice and organized everything else around it. Clearmountain captured it with a clarity that made every element audible and purposeful. The musicians who came after — in hip-hop, in new wave, in house, in whatever genre reached for that three-note phrase and felt the floor come up to meet them — were not sampling a disco record. They were borrowing an architecture.
