“A better love you won’t find today”
From “I Want Your Love” by Chic
I wonder if Carl Rogers and Nile Rodgers ever met.
The late Carl Rogers was one of the founders of Humanistic psychology. In a world where Freud was convinced that people were all lascivious, primitive id-mongers and Skinnner proposed that people were empty vessels waiting to be Clockwork Oranged, Rogers had the audacity to suggest that human beings were fundamentally good. And while human beings were inherently good, it was society that choked the goodness out of us, like weeds in a garden. And the goal of therapy was to help people pull out the weeds in their lives so that they can embrace their goodness.
This philosophy may be hard to believe at a time when every headline seems geared towards proving Rogers’ view of human beings wrong…enter Nile Rodgers. Throughout his 50 plus years of living and despite all of the horrible things that he has experienced and are happening in the world today, Rodgers has maintained a simple powerful belief in the goodness of people and the possibility of a utopian world. And talking recently with Nile Rodgers, a founding member of the band Chic, made me hopeful that Rogers’ humanistic philosophy of human beings still has legs.
I mean this makes sense. How else can one person write, perform or produce so many feel-good songs? When considering the lyrics of Rodgers’ songs with Chic like “Good Times,” “Le Freak,” “Dance, Dance, Dance,” and songs he’s co-written or produced for other artists such as Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” B-52s’ “Love Shack” or Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” it’s hard to ignore the consistent and explicit call to action for us to love, dance and appreciate each other. What’s more, Rodgers has a long history of activism – particularly fighting for racial justice first as a member of the New York Black Panther Party and eventually as founder of the We Are Family Foundation.
Rodgers grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This experience was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, he found a multi-cultural society filled with love and acceptance. “Jewish, Puerto Rican, Chinese, Italian, Black… a society that was really a very colorful mosaic of neighborhoods and cultures. And we were all crammed together,” Rodgers told me. “Everybody, for the most part … treated me with kindness and respect. That was a good part of my life.” On the other hand, he found that he was the frequent target of racism – both from neighborhood bullies and the police who often took their side. “It just happened so much and so regularly that I actually changed it into a game,” he said. “I looked at it like I was a really fast runner, I could outrun everybody. And so, I never got caught. I was never arrested. I don’t have a record. I never did anything wrong. So, at first, I was scared, but then it just became normal life.”
Now, for many people, the negative impact of repeated racist attacks would outweigh the good vibes he experienced from living in this multi-cultural melting pot. But Rodgers had a choice – love or hate and he chose to love – to believe in the possibility of people’s goodness. “I actively chose to talk about the world that I wanted to see, rather than the world that I was in. Maybe I was a dreamer. If you look up my old report cards, they always say the same thing,” he said. “Nile is a good student, but he doesn’t pay attention in class. He’s looking out the window. … so, I was always dreaming about the good world.”
Beyond just dreaming, Rodgers went further and put this love into action. He found that he didn’t have to be a passive player in the world in which he lived. He could help shape the world. “I started to care for people — love people, appreciate people, help people,” Rodgers described. “My parents taught me to treat people the way that you want them to treat you. So, that’s just the sort of hippy lens that I looked at the world through.”
One of the early ways he put love into action was as a teenage member of The Black Panther Party. Rodgers saw it as a natural outgrowth of wanting a loving, accepting society and recalled how the Black Panthers found a win-win solution that provided food for those in his community who needed it while also benefiting the local businesses.
“The Panthers taught me how to do business with local vendors, to talk to the businesses that were in the community, to convince them that it was a great tax write off for them to give us the food that was perishable that they’d have to return and have a negative balance on their books. Whereas if they donated it to us, they’d get a tax write off and they wouldn’t have to send it back,” he explained. “So, the truth is…any vendor, they loved us, they thought we were wonderful, and people, people used to look at us with pride … That’s why we didn’t take the subway – we walked. We wanted people to see us coming through there. We wanted people … to feel that there was that extra safety net.”
Rodgers felt that one of the places where his utopian vision of the world fully existed and thrived was in a disco. “When I went into a disco for the first time, I saw … the physical embodiment of what we were trying to do politically. We saw people from all different walks of life, completely disparate people,” Rodgers said. “And all of a sudden, Donna Summer comes on and the Village People come on and everybody is pledging allegiance to this music. All without prompting – was just the beat. It was primal, was loving. And nobody criticized anybody.”
Not content to just observe disco culture, Rodgers soon became an active contributor by forming the band Chic which went on to be considered one of the greatest bands in disco history. Writing music gave him an outlet. “Music was my escapism, I could write about this beautiful utopian world,” Rodgers described. But he was careful not to dictate the meanings of his songs. “I never try and tell people to feel what they’re going to feel. If they want to know what I was feeling when I was writing it, I’ll explain it to them.”
Allowing listeners to interpret his music as they wished resulted in rather awkward but humorous moments for Rodgers, especially with Chic’s song “Le Freak.” “So, the biggest song in the history of Atlantic Records is this little ditty that we threw together, because we weren’t allowed one night into Studio 54 … And we wrote this song that eventually we started out as Ah, “F” off … And when we get to the chorus, and we go, Ah, freak out. Le freak, C’est Chic. … We were writing about a dance that everybody was doing in New York,” Rodgers recalled. “Well, every time I meet an African musician, or when I met Nelson Mandela or I meet almost anyone from Africa. They actually think we’re singing A…Frica… Can you imagine Nelson Mandela telling you how cool that is? You certainly can’t correct him!”
These days, Rodgers continues his commitment to activism and his utopian vision through the We Are Family Foundation. Inspired by his song, “We Are Family,” Rodgers’ foundation brings together people from different ethnicities and backgrounds to fight systemic racism and injustice in the United States and internationally. His foundation focuses on teens as it recognizes that before people can be hardened in their views, there is an opportunity to help young people keep an open mind. “…we concentrate on teens and youth. Because once we get to a certain age…we just keep listening to the same songs that we like when we’re younger. Our philosophy, our politics are pretty much made up. It’s very difficult to change,” he said. “We’ve learned that so many of these well-intentioned youth organizations that are anti-racist and anti-bias organizations are underfunded…and they’d still be going strong if they had support but they don’t have the type of training that we have in the Black Panther Party. They don’t know how to engage with vendors and corporations and people…So we will be a sort of mini accelerator to help them get to the next level.”
And as Rodgers’ continues to dream of and work for the world he wants to see, somewhere Carl Rogers is smiling.
To hear full conversation click here.
Photo credit: Jill Furmanovsky
