Forgetting How to Play Your Hit Song in Ibiza with Nile Rodgers
A Journey in Perspective
This story by Brendan Jay Sullivan has been translated from the original French.
Nile Rodgers was at the 2013 International Music Summit in Ibiza when he realized that, guitar in hand, he couldn’t remember how to play “Get Lucky” his smash hit collaboration with Daft Punk. Like Ibitha and dance culture in general — Rogers is bigger he ever was in the disco era as the frontman of the band Chic. He is the oldest person in the room by twenty years, but certainly the coolest. Daft Punk isn’t with him but as a sound tech starts the track the room grows chilly as they realize with great anticipations that — oh my god, oh my god!! — Rodgers who has the number one record in 65 countries is about to play his hit single for the first time live. The beat comes in, Rodgers runs a hand along the fretboard. And when he looks up at the crowd Rogers realizes he has forgotten how to play it.
Ibiza is all about perspective.
Zoom all the way out and the island of Ibiza is one giant dance party. The people, the sweat, there are hands in the air, bodies in motion. Every thought and feeling pulses in four-on-the-floor unison. OONTZ, OONTZ, OONTZ, OONTZ.
If you had come to Earth from another planet — which is what these people look like at times — you would think there was a celestial unity dance going on. A primitive mating ritual that unites the species as one. Translate the lyrics of the music and you’d find themes of unity, love, freedom, and sex so raw you can smell it in the air. The songs are engineered with peaks and valleys, drops that the audience screams along to together like a roller coaster. Only this ride is nonstop.
In the 1970s when Nile Rodgers formed Chic, Ibiza was a tiny island where hippies and artists went to escape the moral code of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The artist Salvador Dalí was a regular fixture and the Catalan speaking locals were open minded. It was then that future dance music empire owner Ricardo Urgell bought a desolate half acre for $14,000 and built his little club Pacha.
Fast forward to today and that’s not enough to pay a DJ for a single set. Pacha Ibiza made 40 millions euros last year. Competition is steep as dancers fill parties at clubs like Sankeys and places with brain-trauma sounding names like Amnesia. This isn’t Miami where revelers cram in poolside or Las Vegas where casinos hope to lure people to their cavernous gambling rooms by installing night clubs with the familiar thump of Top 40 hits of the last ten years on repeat or even Berlin where the clubs open on Thursdays and close Tuesday mornings. This is Ibiza where people party 7 days a week as if the world were ending at dawn. Even Nostradamus once predicted “Ibiza will be Earth’s only refuge after Armageddon.” If you asked any of these clubbers where they would go after Armageddon they would have thought you were talking about a new club that was opening.
Zoom all the way in and you see lumpy bodies of American and Greek tourists, sweaty armpits held up at nostril-level while they step on strangers’ feet, German teenagers drunk on cheap beer, staggering drunkenly to the beat at an hour when decent people should be at work. You see fistfights and people hospitalized. Zoom too much in and you find bodily fluids ejected by the hazy, sun-stroked bodies of people who should have gone home at dawn. Zoom closer and see the regret of hasty hook ups. Zoom far too far in and you will find hepatitis and other pathogens.
But what happened to the beautiful people of this island paradise?
“It was a dream one day to be rolling at a soap bubble party,” says model Brett Helshman. “Now I wouldn’t be caught dead in there.
“I went for the first time about 5 years ago,” says journalist Anne Riley-Katz. “Then I went back 2 years ago and wanted to kill myself because it was high-level techno, low-rent, crowded grab bag of awful douchbaggery. Ughhh… I felt like I needed a bath right afterward.”
But yet the crowds are bigger than ever. It’s not like they will get so crowded that people stop coming.
The fact of the matter is dance music is big business now. Clubs like Pacha and music festivals feed into an EDM machine estimated to be worth over $4.5 billions. The largest EDM clubs in Vegas make over $600m, with two huge additions arriving in 2013. Clubs like XS do over $80 mil Marquee a bit over $60 million. “Heard of these places? Probably not. And that’s just the point. As aboveground as EDM has become, it’s still underground,” so says music writer Bob Lefsetz. For all the glitz and glamor the clubs portray: this is still music written on computers by people who are not rock stars or even famous guitarists like Nile Rodgers.
Zoom out from David Guetta’s “Fuck Me I’m Famous” party in Ibiza, zoom way, way out for some perspective and put one of his compilation CDs on — the raw, unmixed tracks that fuel this dance fever. You might find yourself wondering, who the hell would listen to this vacuous material? Drum beats and eight-minute assanine lyrics written in English?
“It doesn’t appeal to the mainstream media. The talent isn’t made up of photogenic paraders, there’s no drama and the reporters hate the music.” Lefsetz says, “Which is why EDM is burgeoning. It’s owned by the young. It’s a perfect medium for today, not dependent upon recordings and based on the unstealable live experience.”
Zoom all the way out and that is the secret to Ibiza. You don’t have to know the latest dance craze or even own the albums. You’ll be singing along to the repetitive hooks. You are just another one of the ceaseless mass of bodies. OONTZ OONTZ OONTZ OONTZ.
“Southern Europe, Spain and Italy, Ibiza’s backbone, are going through an economic crisis,” says Frankfort-based veteran DJ Sven Väth, who has been filling dance floors in Ibiza since 1982. To get into the big clubs now you not only have to fly to Ibiza, you need to get VIP status, which can mean spending thousands of dollars on a table and purchasing $1000 bottles of champagne. “Who can afford to come to these events at the clubs now?”
Zoom out and you see a region in crisis, where even the wealthy have little to celebrate these days. No one is popping champagne to the latest unemployment figures (27.2% in Spain, and even higher among the young). But you don’t see that when you are in Ibiza, the entire region is in crisis except for the tiny island of Ibiza. Nostradamus may have already been proven right.
But even Ibiza isn’t safe, big name DJs like Tiësto are skipping the island this summer to form their own world tours. Only David Guetta — who built and must protect his brand at Pacha — will return weekly for his party. For all this labors, Guetta keeps a white stuccoed home in the foothills of Ibiza with a pool in the shape of a crucifix — the kind of home that only belong to a rock star or a bond villain.
Zoom out and you see how much this region needs an influx of tourist dollars. Please stay out all night and dance. Please bring cash. Please bring your friends.
Zoom back in on Nile Rogers, sitting in the conference room of the International Music Summit where he has forgotten how to play the number one record in sixty-five countries. The room is beige-grey, like an office. The audience wears namebadges. This could be a conference about brake pads or life insurance. Even five years ago bands like Rodgers’ own Chic or Kool and the Gang only got booked as the special retro surprise for middle aged software developers at a conference. But now Nile Rodgers and Chic are back together, billed on Ibiza Rocks’ 16 week long summer live music jam as “Chic feat. Nile Rogers.” The assembled crowd around him are marveling at the old man, the once-forgotten legend behind “Good Times” the song that was later borrowed by producers of the Sugar Hill Gang to birth mainstream hip hop with the song “Rapper’s Delight.” Rodger’s first hit record was “Everybody Dance” followed quickly by “Le Freak.”
As with Daft Punk — currently the biggest crossover in Ibiza as it plays quietly in restaurants and then reworked for Techno, Dubstep and House music nights — Niles specialty is vibing with other artists until that magic third thing happens (“…ahhhh FREAK OUT!”). He lent production to Diana Ross for his disco makeover after the collapse of the Supremes. This gave her the hits “Upside Down” and “I’m Coming Out” — later retooled by Diddy to become the Biggie Smalls hit “Mo Money, Mo Problems.” The list goes on, Bowie’s greatest commercial success Let’s Dance. Duran Duran’s “Notorious” (also later retooled for Biggie). Miles Davis begged him to write him a disco hit. Later Rodgers all but invented Madonna with “Like a Virgin” and “Material Girl” and the B-52s “Love Shack.” All songs that still fill dancefloors in the alternative rooms of Ibizas bigger parties.
So why can’t he get the fingering down?
Zoom all the way in on his hands. Rodgers is pushing 60. He isn’t on stage, he’s sitting in a chair in the conference room. “Get Lucky” is playing on the speaker system, softly enough that you can hear Nile Rogers on the studio version playing a funky hook. But zoom in on the fender Stratocaster and you seem him fumble with the fingering.
“It was a year ago,” Rodgers laughs, mentioning that in the year since he worked with Daft Punk, they have never rehearsed or performed. The conference room crowd all have their camera phones out, unwittingly filming an embarrassment. “Gimme a break.” The room laughs along with him.
Then the old man stands up. He hoists the guitar up. The audience cheers. He’s back in action.
Outside the parties are already starting up for the day and it’s not even noon. Some are just getting home. Rodgers may not remember the song, but he knows his way around a guitar. He nudges his way to B minor and then plays along with his own record. He then wills the guitar into picking up the groove.
Pharell comes on over the speakers:
We’re up all night til the sun
We’re up all night for good fun
We’re up all night to get lucky.
By the hook, Rodgers digs in, grooving along. The crowd cheers.
Zoom out and the whole city is a cheering mass of music lovers, screaming for more.
It’s easy to ignore how Miami or Las Vegas or even Dubai has exploded in recent years, but places like Manhattan and Ibiza and Taiwan and Japan in general show us how as the world doubles and as a worldwide middle class struggles for the same resources: we actually have precious little to go around.
People come to Ibiza to forget their worries, forget their personal drama, they go out and forget their friends, they sing along to songs and forget the words and sometimes, like Rodgers, they forget even more. But the memories stay.
