“Ripped them off”: The bassline Queen stole from Chic
A lesser-known fact about the iconic bass riff in Queen’s ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ is that it was directly inspired by Chic’s ‘Good Times’. While ‘Good Times’ features a bright and upbeat bassline, Queen’s version takes a darker turn. The ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ bassline is deeper, more sinister, and subtly shifts the rhythm, giving the song a distinctly different, edgier feel while paying homage to the funk-driven groove of the original.
‘Another One Bites the Dust’ is built around that bassline, which was, of course, was built off the foundations of another song. “It was clearly an homage, not to mention that John Deacon was with me in the studio when I wrote the damn thing,” Chic’s Nile Rodgers told The Guardian in 2014.
Rodgers explained how he and Chic bassist Bernard Edwards wrote the track, stating: “It was funny the way we discovered that walking bassline – it was a total accident,” Rodgers said. “Bernard started playing something, and I screamed, ‘Walk!’ And he did, and that was ‘Good Times’.” ‘Good Times’ was, in turn, influenced by Kool and the Gang’s ‘Hollywood Swinging’, of which Rodgers’ cousin was a member.
Seen as Queen’s foray into disco, bassist John Deacon took the lead in writing ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ and performed most of the instruments to boot. His initial lyrics were about cowboys, which didn’t match the tone of the completed track, so he scrapped them and rewrote them instead. While Freddie Mercury was on board with the song, Roger Taylor was against it, and Brian May was also less sure of the track.
Edwards later pointed out that many did not give Chic credit for inspiring the song. “That Queen record came about because that bass player…spent some time hanging out with us at our studio,” Edwards told NME. “But that’s OK. What isn’t OK is that the press… started saying that we had ripped them off! 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 ‘n’ roll song.” In the 1950s, it was common practice for labels to have white artists record covers of Black artists’ songs.
Recently, the issue of songwriting credits has become more fraught, with songwriters purchasing insurance to protect against copyright claims and artists like Olivia Rodrigo retroactively adding in credits for songs that may sound similar.
And it wasn’t just Queen, either. A slew of artists across genres were inspired by the song. Rodgers and Edwards once threatened Sugarhill Gang with legal action for copyright infringement on ‘Rapper’s Delight’, which led to a settlement and songwriting credits.
May has also spoken about the relationship between the songs, offering a very clear understanding of the inspiration. “It’s very Nile Rodgers, and John absolutely adored him — we all do,” he said in a 2019 interview with Guitar World. “John was very influenced by him, without a doubt. What an amazing guy Nile Rodgers is. He’s got his own vocabulary, his own world.”
It was also a matter of peers taking inspiration from fellow artists. Blondie’s ‘Rapture’ also took cues from ‘Good Times’. “That shows you bands like Queen were our friends,” Rodgers revealed in 2016. “Pink Floyd will tell you straight up when they wrote ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, they were in the studio next to us,” Rodgers said. “They listened to our patterns and went, ‘Wow.’ It’s a famous rock & roll story when you hear them arguing over the drum beat, and they listen to us playing ‘Good Times’, and they go, ‘Let’s copy that.’ There was no wall between the musicians and what we do.”
