Paris Alston: This is GBH is Morning Edition. Remember when Beyonce’s "Cuff It" turned into a TikTok dance sensation? As it turns out, the man behind the iconic guitar strum on that song has been making people dance for decades.

Nile Rodgers: As an artist, all I really wanted to do was get one hit record. I know that my music will outlive me, which is just unbelievable.

Alston: Nile Rodgers, the Grammy Award-winning musician, producer and songwriter, has collaborated with everyone from Madonna to Daft Punk and Pharrell. And at 71 years old, the two time cancer survivor is still performing with his band CHIC, including last year’s NPR tiny Desk performance.

Alston: It’s all a testament to how Roger’s music transcends generations. During a recent performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, you could see fans of all ages grooving to songs like "Material Girl" and "I Want Your Love." I caught up with him there to discuss his career, which includes narrating a bedtime story for Apple Music and talking about songwriting on his podcast, Deep Hidden Meaning Radio. And just to note that we were chatting during the artist Shabaka’s set, which you can hear a bit of in the background.

Alston: You have this podcast where you talk to songwriters from all different generations in different genres. It seems like someone who’s been doing this so long has so much that they’ve already learned and figured out about songwriting. But what do you learn from speaking with other people?

Rodgers: See, that’s the thing is that I learned, that basically we’re all cut from similar cloth. The most current interview I had a couple of days ago was will.i.am. It was so descriptive and graphic in the way that he explained everything and I was like, man, it sounds like me. I told him, I said, you know, Kool and the Gang, basically my family, that they formed that band in my Uncle Victor’s living room and one of our famous songs, Good Times, is my reinterpretation of "Hollywood Swinging." And he looked at me, went, what? And I said, play it. Boom, boom, boom. I said, that’s all. Just that little bit doo doo dah. I just, I said, hey, hey, hey. Doo doo doo doo doo boom boom do do do do. You know, I said not as if we didn’t do the whole thing. As a matter of fact, if somebody walked in the room and said, damn, that reminds me of "Hollywood Swinging," I wouldn’t [inaudible.]

Alston: In the way that we interpret music and consume it now, with TikTok and all that, it’s so much more condensed. It’s these snippets. Your music has always had these long riffs where it’s like, if you’re really into it, that happiness comes out, but people don’t have that now.

Rodgers: Yeah, you know, a lot of that has to do with the fact that at the time we started composing pop music, if you will, they had just invented the 12 inch record, which meant that we could cut the grooves deeper and we could achieve more bass. The records would have greater bandwidth because they were long. So my very first composition was a song called "Everybody Dance."

Rodgers: And I don’t even know how long it is, but it’s long. And that’s what I wrote. It seems like right now our attention spans are so short, that everything is just getting shorter and shorter and shorter. You have — so when I was younger, I was an activist. I was, subsection leader in the lower Manhattan Black Panthers in the Harlem Branch in New York City. And I went to a disco when I was with my then girlfriend and crowd was so disparate that it wasn’t like, okay, this is a Puerto Rican club. This is a Black club, this a gay club. This was just a club and everybody was dancing. So I was like, God damn, this is the kind of unity that we try to make people feel when I was in the Panthers.

Alston: When people hear your music generations from now, how do you want them to remember you?

Rodgers: Happy.

Alston: That was Nile Rodgers speaking with me at the Newport Jazz Festival. You're listening to GBH news.

Remember when Beyoncé’s “Cuff It” turned into a TikTok dance sensation? The man behind the iconic guitar strum on that song has been making people dance for decades.

Nile Rodgers, the Grammy Award-winning musician, producer and songwriter, has collaborated with everyone from Madonna to Daft Punk and Pharrell. At 71 years old, the two-time cancer survivor is still performing with his band CHIC including last year’s NPR Tiny Desk performance.

“As an artist, all I really wanted to do was get one hit record. I know that my music will outlive me, which is just unbelievable,” Niles told GBH’s Morning Edition co-host Paris Alston at the Newport Jazz Festival.

It’s all a testament to how Rodger’s music transcends generations. During a recent performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, fans of all ages grooved to songs like “Material Girl” and “I Want Your Love.”

He has also narrated a bedtime story for Apple Music and talks about songwriting on his podcast, Deep Hidden Meaning Radio.

The podcast helps him find connections with fellow songwriters, he said.

“That’s the thing is that I learned, that basically we’re all cut from similar cloth,” he said. “The most current interview I had a couple of days ago was will.i.am. It was so descriptive and graphic in the way that he explained everything, and I was like, man, it sounds like me.”

Rodgers’ music has long riffs, something that doesn’t always fit in with the way people interpret and consume music now, with condensed snippets on TikTok.

“At the time we started composing pop music, if you will, they had just invented the 12 inch record, which meant that we could cut the grooves deeper and we could achieve more bass,” Rodgers said. “The records would have greater bandwidth because they were long.”

His first composition, CHIC’s “Everybody Dance,” is 6 minutes and 41 seconds long — though it had a 3:30 radio edit.

“It seems like right now our attention spans are so short, that everything is just getting shorter and shorter and shorter,” he said.

Rodgers sees his music as a way to unite people.

“When I was younger, I was an activist. I was subsection leader in the lower Manhattan Black Panthers in the Harlem Branch in New York City,” he said. “And I went to a disco when I was with my then-girlfriend, and crowd was so disparate. It wasn’t like, okay, this is a Puerto Rican club, this is a Black club, this a gay club. This was just a club, and everybody was dancing. So I was like, God damn, this is the kind of unity that we try to make people feel when I was in the Panthers.”

When people hear his music generations from how, how does Rodgers want to be remembered?

“Happy,” he said.