Respectfully, I Say To Thee, I Enjoyed What I Was Reading

Now I don't particularly get into memoirs and I'd really have to rack my mind to remember how many I've ever read, period (OK, fine, I exaggerate: the Mötley Crüe multi-memoir The Dirt is one of the most entertaining things I've ever read), but Nile Rodgers' Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny was pretty good, and in retrospect, there are good reasons why it was good.

One of the main reasons is that Rodgers is perhaps the most famous person you wouldn't recognize. I feel like I'm a fairly literate music fan and you'd still have to cue me about who he is. But if you've ever been to a school dance, wedding or bar or bat mitzvah you totally know his work; the most powerful man in America is able to get not only you and your spouse or squeeze on the dance floor but also three generations of uncles and aunts knocking into you while you're out there.

Who wrote "We Are Family"? This guy. Who wrote that weird song that goes "Awwwwwww Freak Out"? This guy. Who did like all these disco songs you have fully internalized without knowing how? Yup. Whose "Good Times" is like the ur sample for all of hip-hop? Same guy. Then there's like every single gigantic album he produced. David Bowie's Let's Dance, Madonna's Like a Virgin, that boffo-gigantic Diana Ross album that you totally, unaccountably know by heart.

All that and to you he's just a name in block letters underneath the song listing on the tail of a cassette tape J-card. It's kind of crazy. Which is also to say, while the memoir genre is thoroughly ate up, there are some memoirs like this that you're curious to read.

The other great thing about Le Freak is that while Rodgers may be a big enough figure to merit a ghost writer, he doesn't use one, and the effect is awesome — it's polished writing, but not too polished, and there are enough weird parts, rookie flourishes, borderline grammatical mistakes and outright typos to make it feel real. A girlfriend mentioned in the text is revealed as an interpreter in a photo caption in the glossy-paged middle insert. An entire part of the book is titled "Roam If You Want To" after the B-52s song he worked on, yet the B-52s are only mentioned twice in the book, both times in a long list of other artists. I love it. [Taking a moment to Google "ghostwritten autobiographies" . . .] It seems like it's the exception when someone actually writes something him- or herself. That seems sad. Fucking Kennedy.

The other other great thing about Le Freak is that — and I don't know if he's like this in real life, but he definitely comes off this way in his autobiography — Rodgers seems pretty humble about his success. And remember, this isn't success like he opened a successful pizza chainlet success but rather success like he guided pop music for thirty years or so there.

Maybe part of that humble effect is the role of the producer — i.e., subordinate to the performers themselves rather than out in front. There are a few moments in Le Freak where Rodgers admits he felt slighted — when David Bowie found it difficult to mention his contributions in interviews, or when he focused less on Let's Dance and more on his older recordings. It grounds Rodgers (for the reader) and makes him seem sympathetic.

Of course, if you remember Let's Dance — and that was a big album when I was a single-digit-aged youth, so it sticks out in my mind — you might think that it's kind of lesser Bowie. Or at least the preppy-era Bowie was less compelling than Ziggy Stardust. I'm not a Bowie fan (and I definitely wouldn't name my fucking kid after him, that's for sure), but "Suffragette City" compared to "China Girl"? It's no contest. On the one hand you have "Wham bam thank you ma'am!" On the other you have "Just you shut your mouse." Right?

And the Duran Duran remixes — I mean I could take or leave those. "Reflex" is so much lesser than "Hungry Like the Wolf." But take his career as a whole and you soon realize that anyone who makes you dance with your great aunt at a bar mitzvah — year after year after year — will forever and always have scoreboard, case closed.

The other humbling experience in Rodgers' life and career was being at the top of the charts as a disco band, only to see people turn on disco so quickly and thoroughly that for a time there at least the idea of a second act probably seemed absurd. He writes, and I buy it, that there was something disturbing about how mainstream America acted so viciously toward this music played and enjoyed by minorities, gays and associated outsiders. It's a perspective I hadn't appreciated, mostly because I think disco does suck, except that disco is 500 times more organic sounding and catchy and structurally sound than the soulless dance music that came later. As for that second act, he had a pretty good second act, didn't he?

There's a little bit of a Shakespeare in Love feel to the book — which, come to think of it, is of a piece with the book's self-effacing tone — where Rodgers lifts veils and tells stories about the genesis of certain songs. The kernel for that Diana Ross multi-gazillion hit song "Upside Down," for example, was a comment she made to Rodgers and his writing partner when they sat down with her to meet for the first time — like, "What's been going on?" "Well, I just moved to the east coast and things are upside down for me."

Now I don't know how you go from that innocent comment to the coke-blubber-blabber staccato of "Respectfully, I say to thee, I'm aware that you're cheating but no one makes me feel like you do," but I suppose that's the magic of songwriting. Speaking of which, that line always made me laugh — at some point in America cheating went from being a nuisance to a dealbreaker, and apparently that happened sometime after Diana Ross' "Upside Down" was released (1980). Were that line written today, I think it might have to be updated to something along the lines of, "Respectfully, I say to thee, you smell like a hobo, but no one makes me feel like you do"; women have higher standards for guys who are able to deliver much less than they used to; bathing semi-regularly is at least a start.

The song "Le Freak" — you know it, it goes something along the lines of, "AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW, FREAK OUT!!" — has a good story, too. The original lyric, written after getting turned away when trying to see Grace Jones play at Studio 54, was "Awwww, fuck off — fuck Studio 54 — fuck off." Thirty years later, we have Cee Lo.

I always say that I know I shouldn't read something thinking it could be a movie, but this could be a great period piece; Rodgers the character has seen most of rock and roll music history firsthand; I suppose the music rights would be prohibitive though. I read later that he wants to do a musical version. Maybe, but a movie would be better.

Another impressive thing, I should add, is the amount of cocaine that once existed in the world. According to the book, Rodgers used it until 1994 (!), when the Sugarhill Gang finally caught up to him and he found himself with nary a machete in sight with which to defend himself. It makes it difficult to look at the pictures in the inserted section without assuming that everyone has been up for hours snorting coke. There's also a confusing caption in a picture featuring Jaye Davidson.

But ultimately, I think the very best thing about Le Freak is the bombshell it drops in the waning paragraphs of the epilogue. Talk about "burying ledes" — things are humming along great and you feel pretty good about the world until Rodgers reveals he has cancer, and not just any cancer but an unnamed aggressive form of cancer (which I later Googled was prostate cancer and apparently he's now cancer free). A lesser writer would have started with this tidbit, or foreshadowed it, or something grotesque and impertinent. Not Rodgers, which is, again, part of what makes Le Freak so refreshing to read.

Posted: March 16th, 2013 | Author: Scott | Filed under: Books Are The SUVs Of Writing | Tags: Book Club, Misheard Lyrics, Whither The J-Card?

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