Featured Essay: Chic's "Risque"

by Christopher Sloce

“Is this your copy of Risque?” A question worth asking. Since I moved here for work in 2015, it’s been six apartments and ten years, with more roommates than years. Most of those apartments were like jerry holes more than homes, places I dug between insulation and drywall. If it weren’t my partner’s Chic album, I would have had a hard time guessing whose it is. Every couple nights of the week, they might play “Slide” by Slave and Jimmy Douglas or “Lady Marmalade,” Leo Nocentelli’s ringing sixths in both my ears. Raised in a multigenerational house where their grandfather said Booker T and the MGs were “too white," an errant Chic album was not out of the question. “No.” They said. 

That only made the question of where I got it more curious, because most of my education in 60s-70s black radio staples have come from them. There was the roommate who gave me their copies of Let’s Stay Together and Purple Rain gifted to them by someone they dated and broke up with. As far as I can tell, if you have to buy someone Let’s Stay Together, it’s already over, and you’re just jingling the change in your pockets, asking to play. Again, I don’t believe it’s that roommate’s. There was another possibility: I did live there with the guy who I shared the spot above the coffee shop before that was owned by the anti-masker, the one who lost his staff when he tried to get Richmond police to raid our neighborhood with no evidence during the 2020 protests, who woke up with “ANTIFA RULES” spray painted on the door. Somehow, I shared more houses with that roommate than I have my partner (only one was livable). Early on, I remember flipping through our cumulative records, and my memory of what my friends enjoy is pretty good. We had in common battered Marquee Moons, but the fading The Payback was mine. It’s nothing against anyone’s taste, it’s just what tangential part of their taste that made these DIY kids interested in Chic and how it never came up. In the prior house, a broken down house that was effectively a boarding house, my record may have cross pollinated with my other vinyl owning roommates. 

The slide the downwardly mobile college educated have been on has created new social contexts. Everyone spends years before they meet someone special or spread their wings to fly off with another pitying sharing space with people in dilapidated places where they paint over the radiators. You share things in that time because everyone is hunkered down together trying to stretch money. And when you go somewhere else and put down your stick and bindle, you find somebody else’s totem and have to figure out what it meant to them. On some level, it might be an inadvertent gift, but that just might be pareidolia. 

At base, most of our belongings are just items, no matter how much we care about them. It never really becomes more apparent than when you move. The results of all of our labor can be safely entombed in cardboard; entire lives can fit inside a truck and restart somewhere else, where you feel like you’ve been reborn wearing somebody else’s clothes for the first bit. It never gets more comfortable because it’s never really home and I don’t know when that happens for me or anybody else, when I won’t be moving from apartment to apartment, able to put down something like a real life that grows instead of contracts. A life that you can’t merely put in boxes, a life that isn’t missing a certain kind of cable or a certain piece that makes it operate correctly, a life that isn’t in somebody’s closet because they weren’t sure when they’d see you next, a life that isn’t picked up out of a milk crate and asked “Whose is this?” There’s still so much packed away somewhere, and it’s hard to make time to unload it and know what it is, and there’s so much that’s missing. Case in point: when I finally checked out Risque, I had to pull up a rip of the full album on youtube. I don’t know where my record player is, if it’s in one alley or another. But as it turns out, the album’s pretty good. 

Christopher Sloce is a writer in Richmond, Virginia whose work has featured in Typebar, Cobblestones, and other venues. His cultural analysis series Apophaby is available at Kittysneezes at least once a month. You can follow him on Bluesky at @muleskinnerpress.net.