The David Bowie song that Nile Rodgers called “groundbreaking”
It was the early 1980s, and David Bowie was ready for a change. While he was one of the most recognisable musicians in the world, Bowie was more known for his transgressive career choices and off-kilter public persona. He had nabbed plenty of hits across his decade and change in the music industry, but Bowie wanted more. Instead of challenging the status quo, Bowie wanted to be the status quo.
To achieve this, Bowie decided to hire Nile Rodgers for his next album. Although the days of disco were mostly gone, Rodgers had transitioned from Chic’s creative leader to an in-demand producer for the likes of Diana Ross and Sister Sledge. Bowie was aiming straight for the mainstream with Let’s Dance, so Rodgers was the perfect co-pilot to help him get there.
“We spent almost every waking hour together until we got into the studio,” Rodgers told Uncut for their feature David Bowie: Ultimate Record Collection. “The thing that we all have to understand and respect about artists is that sometimes their greatest capital is the way they’re perceived by the public. That might be the most powerful thing that they have. Once I knew he wanted a hit – and he didn’t say ‘hit single’, by the way. He said hit album. He wanted the whole thing to be great. And that’s why we had not only ‘Let’s Dance’, but also ‘Modern Love’, which was groundbreaking. I don’t think he thought it was possible.”
In order to achieve Bowie’s full vision, Rodgers had to take the material that Bowie had shown him and reinterpret it for the modern day. That’s how he wound up rearranging the folky ballad ‘Let’s Dance’ into a hard-driving funk number. Rodgers also gave Bowie’s collaboration with Iggy Pop, ‘China Girl’, an updated coat of paint. Rodgers also created the guitar intro that kicked off ‘Modern Love’.
“Every single Chic record starts with a hook. When we did ‘Modern Love’, I felt that it had to have some kind of interesting intro to hook you right at the top too,” Rodgers explained in the Bowie-centric book Loving the Alien (!983 – 1988). “David did the lead vocals for ‘Criminal World’, ‘Modern Love’, ‘China Girl’, ‘Let’s Dance’ and ‘Shake It’, all those vocals in one day. And we got most of the instrumental solos done in a day too. Kenny Loggins later told me, ‘I stole the guitar riff from the intro to ‘Modern Love’ for the beginning of the song ‘Footloose’, it’s exactly the same!’”
Rodgers also took another page from the book of Chic when it came to the album credits for Let’s Dance. “If you look at Chic album credits, we never specify what song anyone plays on, and that is because Bernard [Edwards] and I wanted everybody to go out and be successful,” Rodgers told Sound on Sound in 2005. “We used to say to them ‘Look, if no one knows what you did, but they know that you’re on it in some way, I don’t care if you lie and tell people ‘Oh yeah, I did that song.’‘ We used to tell them to do that all the time, and they did.”
“Like with David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, no one knows what songs Tony Thompson played on because I never put that in the credits,” Rodgers added. “They say ‘Drums: Omar Hakim and Tony Thompson.’ So, when you see the video and you think ‘Oh, that’s Tony playing on ‘Modern Love’, I go, ‘No, that’s Omar Hakim playing on ‘Modern Love’. Tony Thompson is playing in the video because he was on tour with Bowie.’ So, we did that purposely and I still do that to this day. I just want it to be a sort of communal effort. And I admit that I love looking at credits and saying ‘Oh shit, that’s who played bass on that song,’ but with Chic it’s more about the collective organisation, it’s not about who played on what.”
Check out ‘Modern Love’ down below.
