Chic

…1981, when the disco band Chic released its album Take It Off, featuring the song “Your Love Is Cancelled.” The term was then featured in Mario Van Peebles’s film New Jack City (1991) in a scene in which crime boss Nino Brown (played by Wesley Snipes) says, “Cancel that bitch”…

One of the album’s songs, Chic’s “Le Freak,” was inspired by the club’s notorious velvet-rope policy. After the group’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were refused entry to Studio 54 one night, they went home, channeled their anger into a jam session, and ended up composing one of Chic’s biggest…