Nile Rodgers Talks Racism In Music Industry After Daft Punk Collaboration

Fresh off of a high-profile collaboration with Daft Punk, Chic guitarist/legendary producer of every song you have ever loved Nile Rodgers sat down with The Quietus. While the profile of Rodgers' career is a worthwhile read in its own right, the article had some very interesting things to say about racism in the music industry, something he believes is still rampant.

Via The Quietus:

Despite the evident dancefloor popularity and radio play Chic's worth was very undervalued. Racism was rife in the music industry and a white rock band could be commanding more than five times as much in advances and studio money, by virtue of their skin colour. Worse still is nothing's really changed.

He says: "Absolutely... the thing about this, and this is an extraordinary fact, is that in the whole of the USA which has millions and millions of black people, to my knowledge (and I don't like to quote stats, but I think I'm pretty close to accurate), there are probably only two black bands with proper record deals. One of them is The Roots and of course they have a TV show. They're on TV every night! When I say that though, obviously there are probably black bands in maybe the jazz field, or, you know, at those kind of levels, but what I mean is within the major mainstream record industry there are probably only two. It's extraordinary when you think of the rich American history of black music, loaded with one great black band after the next, after the next, after the next...

"See when the Beatles came along they changed the paradigm. Suddenly we had to be self contained and, I mean, black music flourished! Now all of a sudden you had to be the songwriter, the artist, the composer, the instrumentalist and the performer. In black culture that was perfect, because we've got lots of artists like that. And they haven't gone away, but they just don't have record deals anymore. It's just extraordinary. But meanwhile, if there's a new young rock band they somehow have the means of getting signed. If you have a new R & B band with musicians and instrumentalists? I really don't know where they're gonna get signed..."

The article also touches on the "Disco Sucks!" movement being a surreptitious way to restore a whiter kind of music to the top of the charts:

Their next single, 'Good Times' ossified the Chic concept with its much-celebrated drum and bass breakdown. Written the night before they recorded it, it was released in the summer of 1979. However, hot on its heels was the strange Disco Demolition Night event at Comiskey Park in Chicago, during which a crate of "disco" records was blown up during a baseball game. The record industry leapt on the coat-tails of this insanity and in a flash it was 'disco sucks!' as a stealth of industry daisy cutters rushed to kill 'disco music' and bring good old white, male rock & roll back in place of the equal rights culture of the dancefloor that had mesmerised the mainstream. But according to Nile, 'disco' was the joint that the music was played in: "We didn't call our music disco... we were an R & B band..."

The article gives a remarkable history of Rodgers (whose career you have to know to know anything about production in the last 25 years). Check it out in full over at the Quietus.

What do you think of Nile Rodgers' accusation that racism is still prevalent in the recording industry?

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