C'est Chic

Recorded at the Power Station in New York with Bob Clearmountain engineering. Rodgers said he and Edwards worked on this album and Sister Sledge's We Are Family at the same time in January 1978, cutting the basic tracks in Studio B and adding strings in the larger Studio A. The parts for both albums were finished in a couple of weeks. The rhythm tracks were played live without a click track, a single take was kept, and the strings, horns and vocals were each done in blocks of two or three days. Rodgers said every Chic album had a song announcing the band, and on this one it is Chic Cheer. Alongside the hits are the seven-minute ballad At Last I Am Free and the closing (Funny) Bone. The LP also carries a hidden moog solo.

The European edition was first titled Très Chic, with a cover showing a woman wrapped around a neon tube. It was withdrawn and replaced by the C'est Chic sleeve, and it had a different track list that included Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah) and Everybody Dance.

Reception

It was the band's most commercially successful album. It reached number 4 on the Billboard album chart, topped the US R&B chart for eleven weeks, was certified platinum by the RIAA and reached number 2 in Britain, where it went gold. Billboard named it its R&B album of 1979. Robert Christgau gave it a B and found the hooky cuts more jingles than songs. Pitchfork's Andy Beta described At Last I Am Free as a gaseous, glorious, zero-gravity ballad. Robert Wyatt covered it, with a top 20 hit on the UK Indie Chart in 1980.