Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny

Amazon.com Price: $16.00 (as of 10/11/2019 08:12 PST- Details)

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Description

You are going to hear a Nile Rodgers song today. It’ll make you happy. Legendary producer and co-founder of Chic, Nile wrote ‘We are Family’ for Sister Sledge and ‘I’m Coming Out’ for Diana Ross, and then produced Let’s Dance for David Bowie and Like a Virgin for Madonna. But before he reinvented pop music Nile Rodgers invented himself. Le Freak is an astonishing, exuberant and inspiring story of a creative genius. It is also a stunning recreation of a time and place – by the man who wrote its soundtrack.

A Letter from Creator Nile Rodgers: The Reason I Wrote Le Freak

I started writing Le Freak to answer some questions I had about my life. Not the big existential ones, just the facts. I’d asked my mother a question about our early years and her answer would ignite another spark of curiosity somewhat than provide closure. In no time at all we were off and running like a couple of dog-track greyhounds. The more I wanted to know the more she wanted to tell– love it was some sort of absolution ritual.

Mom didn’t need to apologize for anything–nor did I–we’d already done that countless times all the way through the years. When I started interviewing doctors, institutional historians, members of the family, and friends I noticed there was a real pattern to this process of rediscovery. Everybody wanted to contribute. My inquiries reminded them that we were all a part of an amazing period in American history.

My early childhood was fascinating in the fifties; my teens were quasi-suicidal in the sixties; young adulthood was sexy in the seventies, and the edginess of the eighties lasted into the mid-nineties. Then that edgy life caught up with me. I only turned away from it when it in spite of everything threatened to take away my world’s most precious gift–music.

This isn’t literally a book about music–maybe writing about music in reality is like dancing about architecture, as the old saying goes. But if music takes the jumble of life–the love and loss, the excitement and pain–and neatly arranges it into notes and chords and verses and choruses that one way or the other capture it all, then what I’ve done is a little reverse engineering by recovering all the stuff that got packed into those records, a story that trails around the world and back to a newborn leaving his teenaged mother’s arms on Welfare Island in 1952. So in a way this is a book about music because music is about, well, everything, isn’t it?

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