There are albums that make you feel the room before a single lyric lands, and Risqué is one of them.
Chic recorded it at the Power Station in New York City in the spring of 1979, and you can hear that room — the size of it, the air inside it. Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards had already changed the conversation with C’est Chic, but this was the record where they stopped proving themselves and started sculpting. The difference matters.
The Engine Room
Tony Thompson on drums is the first thing you notice, and the last thing you stop noticing. He was twenty-two years old in that studio, and he plays like someone who already knew the floor had to hold. Edwards locked in beside him on bass — that rolling, conversational low end that never quite goes where you think it will and somehow always lands exactly right. Bob Clearmountain engineered the sessions, and he’s talked about how the rhythm section was essentially a live conversation, how little needed to be fixed after the fact. That’s not how records were made in 1979 if you could help it.
Rodgers played rhythm guitar through a 1959 Stratocaster, direct and compressed, sitting so perfectly in the mix that it almost disappears until you listen for it — and then you can’t unhear it. The string arrangements came from Gene Orloff, lush without ever being soft, adding weight without filling space that needed to breathe.
“Good Times” is the anchor, and it’s maybe the most sampled song in pop history for a reason that no one has quite articulated cleanly: the bass line is a complete argument. Edwards builds it, resolves it, and then just keeps playing it, because the point isn’t resolution. The point is the groove as a place to live. The Sugar Hill Gang heard it. Queen heard it. Everyone heard it.
What’s Actually on Side Two
Side two is where Risqué gets underappreciated. “My Feet Keep Dancing” runs almost six minutes and it earns every second — the horn punches from the Chic Organization’s regular brass crew, the way Alfa Anderson and Luci Martin trade lines in the back half, the sense that the track is genuinely accelerating even when the tempo hasn’t changed. And then “Will You Cry (When You Hear This Song)” lands with a kind of quiet devastation that nobody talks about enough. It’s the only real ballad on the record, and it sits there like a secret.
Rodgers and Edwards produced everything themselves, which by this point was a given, but what’s easy to miss is how much Risqué sounds like a band that’s been on the road and knows its own weight. They rehearsed obsessively. The Power Station sessions were fast because the preparation was long. That efficiency left something in the tape — a lack of strain, a settled quality that you can feel in the low end even on a modest system.
A clean digital copy of this record — a proper hi-res transfer, not a stream-of-uncertain-provenance — played through something that can actually render that bass line without compressing it will rearrange your sense of what late-seventies pop was capable of. This wasn’t disco in the pejorative sense that people use the word. This was engineering, and composition, and a room full of musicians who were playing for keeps.
Put it on after ten o’clock. Give it the volume it’s asking for.