It begins with applause. Before a single note has been played, a crowd is already cheering — a crowd that was never in the room, for a performance that never happened on a stage. Then a keyboard wanders in, unhurried, almost jazzy, and underneath it, the most famous bass sound in disco slides into place: Bernard Edwards, playing low and clean and impossibly steady, while voices spell out the name of the band like a chant. When Chic opened their second album, C’est Chic, with “Chic Cheer” in August 1978, they were not releasing a single. They were making an announcement. This is who we are, the track says, and this is what we sound like when nobody is asking us to be anything else. It lasts less than five minutes, it has barely a lyric to speak of, and it is, in its quiet way, one of the most confident opening statements any band of the decade ever made. The story of “Chic Cheer” is the story of a band that understood something most disco acts never learned: that the groove itself could be the star, and that a rhythm section, left alone for four minutes, could say everything a chorus usually says.
To understand why the record mattered, you have to understand where Chic stood in 1978. They were not newcomers, and they were not yet the institution they would become. They were a New York band formed in 1976 by guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards, with drummer Tony Thompson, who had spent years slogging around the city’s clubs in cover bands, playing everything from jazz to rock to soul, learning how to make a room move. Their self-titled debut album in 1977 had given them a first hit, “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah),” and a calling card: a sound built on Edwards’ bass, Rodgers’ clipped, percussive guitar, Thompson’s drumming, and a rotating cast of superb singers, including Norma Jean Wright and, soon, Alfa Anderson and Luci Martin. But a debut hit is not a career, and in the summer of 1978 disco was both everywhere and, to many ears, already wearing thin — a formula in danger of eating itself. Chic’s second album had to prove that their formula was not a formula at all, but a craft. “Chic Cheer” was the first thing a listener heard, and it was designed to settle the question before the first hit single even arrived.
The album it opened, C’est Chic, was released on Atlantic Records on August 11, 1978. It would reach number four on the Billboard 200 and number one on the R&B albums chart, and it would go platinum in America, powered by two singles that became defining records of the era: “Le Freak,” which topped the Hot 100 for five weeks and became, for a time, the biggest-selling single in Atlantic’s history, and “I Want Your Love,” which reached number seven. But the track listing tells you what Rodgers and Edwards really thought they were doing. Side one opens not with a single but with “Chic Cheer,” then “Le Freak,” then “Savoir Faire,” then “Happy Man.” The message is plain: the hits are here, but they are not the whole band. The album is sequenced like a set list, and “Chic Cheer” is the walk-on music — the sound of a band taking the stage to applause it has awarded itself, in advance, because it knows what is coming next.
The recording captures that confidence in sound. Like the rest of C’est Chic, “Chic Cheer” was recorded and mixed at the Power Station in New York City, the studio whose big, live rooms gave Chic’s records their famous depth and air. The engineers included Bob Clearmountain, who would become one of the great mixers of the era, and the personnel reads like a roll call of New York session royalty: Rodgers on guitar, Edwards on bass, Thompson on drums, Raymond Jones and Robert Sabino on keyboards, Sammy Figueroa on percussion, a string section, horns including Jon Faddis and Ellen Seeling, and a vocal ensemble that included Alfa Anderson, Luci Martin, Diva Gray, David Lasley, and a young Luther Vandross, then still a backing singer on his way to stardom. All songs on the album were written by Edwards and Rodgers and produced by the two of them for the Chic Organization, Ltd., and “Chic Cheer” shows their method at its purest. There is no lead vocal to carry the track, no verse-chorus structure to lean on. Instead there is a groove, built layer by layer — keyboards first, then bass, then guitar, then voices — until the whole thing locks into the kind of pocket that other bands spent entire careers trying to find.
What the track actually sounds like is worth describing carefully, because it is easy to mistake simplicity for emptiness. It opens with that burst of applause, a studio trick that makes the record feel like a live performance, and then a keyboard solo stretches out, minimal and almost jazzy, while the rhythm section waits its turn. When Edwards’ bass enters, it does not announce itself with a flourish; it simply arrives, and suddenly the track has a spine. The backing vocals come in behind it, spelling and chanting the band’s name, and the guitars and strings fill the spaces without ever crowding them. At the end, the applause returns, as if the imaginary crowd has heard the whole thing and approved. Critics noticed the trick at once. One contemporary-flavoured review called it an infectiously funky dance track full of hooks that worm their way into your brain, and a later album guide described it as a surprisingly minimalistic, almost jazzy groove, very classy — and as the band’s rallying cry. Both descriptions are right. The track is minimal by Chic’s standards and still fuller than most bands’ singles, because every part in it is doing exactly one job, and doing it perfectly.
The single’s chart story, told honestly, is a short one — and that is part of the point. “Chic Cheer” was not released as a single in 1978, and it never charted as one. Its job was never to climb a chart; its job was to open an album that climbed charts on the strength of the songs behind it. It did, however, get a second life in two forms that say a lot about how the band was regarded. First, when Atlantic issued Chic’s first greatest-hits collection in late 1979, Les Plus Grands Succès de Chic (released domestically as Chic’s Greatest Hits), “Chic Cheer” opened side two of the American edition — a place of honour on a record that otherwise consisted almost entirely of hit singles, a sign that the label itself regarded the track as essential Chic, not filler. Second, in November 1984, a new mix of the track, the “Chic Cheer (1984 Mix by Bernard Edwards),” was released as a single, a reminder, six years on, that the groove still sounded current in a pop world that had moved on from disco and was still dancing to its children. Neither release made “Chic Cheer” a hit in the ordinary sense. Both confirmed that the people closest to the band knew it was something more than an album opener.
The song’s afterlife, though, is where the story becomes genuinely large, because “Chic Cheer” turned out to be one of the most useful pieces of music Chic ever recorded — useful, that is, to other musicians. Its groove, its chant, its cleanly separated parts made it ideal raw material for the sample culture that followed disco, and in the late 1990s it found a second career it could never have predicted. Faith Evans built her 1998 hit “Love Like This” around a sample of “Chic Cheer,” carrying Rodgers and Edwards’ groove into the R&B charts of a new decade, and Fatman Scoop then sampled Evans’ record in turn for “Be Faithful,” the 1999 party record that became a fixture of clubs and sports arenas in the 2000s. A track that had begun as fake applause for a band introducing itself ended up as the backbone of other people’s choruses, two generations later. That is not an accident. Rodgers and Edwards built their records the way architects build rooms: every part audible, every part removable, every part strong enough to hold up a new building on its own. “Chic Cheer” is the clearest proof of that method, because it is almost nothing but parts — bass, guitar, keyboards, voices — and every one of them has since been borrowed.
There is a wider context here, and it belongs to the year the track was released. In 1978, Chic were at the centre of a pop world that was about to turn on disco, and they knew it. “Le Freak” itself had famously grown out of a night when Rodgers and Edwards were refused entry to Studio 54, the most famous club in the world, and turned their frustration into a dance-floor command. By the summer of 1979, the backlash had a name and a date — Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago on July 12, 1979, when a crowd blew up disco records between games of a baseball doubleheader — and Chic answered it, almost impossibly, with their finest record: Risqué, released on July 30, 1979, whose opening track, “Good Times,” reached number one on August 18, 1979, and became one of the most sampled records in history. “Chic Cheer” belongs to the year before that storm, when disco still seemed invincible and Chic still seemed like its house band. Listening to it now, you can hear a band that had not yet been forced to defend itself, enjoying the luxury of introducing itself at length, to applause, before getting down to business.
That enjoyment is also what the track sounds like. Most album openers try to grab you. “Chic Cheer” does the opposite: it welcomes you, it warms up in front of you, it lets you hear the band assembling itself, and it trusts you to stay. That trust was the whole Chic proposition. Rodgers and Edwards were not just songwriters; they were producers who would go on to shape the sound of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” in the same year, Diana Ross’s Diana, David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, and Madonna’s Like a Virgin, among many others. In every case, the method was the same one you hear on “Chic Cheer”: start with the rhythm section, make every part count, leave space for the vocal to live in, and never let the production get in the way of the groove. The track is a masterclass in that method, delivered before the class had even begun, and it is no coincidence that the musicians who studied it most closely were the ones who went on to run pop music for the next forty years.
There is a final pleasure in the story, and it belongs to the applause. It is fake, of course — a studio effect, a joke, a piece of theatre. But it is also, in retrospect, prophetic. The crowd that Chic imagined cheering them on in 1978 turned out to be real, and it turned out to be much larger than any club audience: it was the generations of dancers, DJs, producers and samplers who kept the groove alive long after disco was declared dead, who found “Chic Cheer” on an album, on a greatest-hits record, on a 1984 remix, in a Faith Evans song, in a Fatman Scoop chant, and recognised it every time. The band gave itself a cheer before anyone else did. History, unusually, agreed with them.
That is why “Chic Cheer” still works, more than forty-five years later, for listeners who have never bought a Chic album and never will. It is not a hit single, and it is not trying to be one. It is the sound of the tightest band in disco introducing itself, in its own time, on its own terms: a keyboard wandering in, a bass line arriving like a fact of nature, voices spelling out a name, and applause at both ends, as if to say that the performance has already happened and you were there for it. The charts never measured it. The dance floor did. And the dance floor, as Chic always knew, was the chart that mattered.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment Edwards’ bass first slides in under the keyboards. It is the sound of a band that did not need a chorus to prove itself — and of a cheer that, against all the odds, turned out to be deserved.