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I Am Spartacus, Goddammit: “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge

By Marcello Carlin


Anthems aren’t just records you remember dancing to at the school disco thirty-five years ago, in the same way that society has to involve everybody, not just those who make the “right” faces. Listening to 1968: The Year The World Burned, Jon Savage’s latest excellent 2CD compilation album, and in particular to “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone (which is included). That’s a politely very angry record and, in the end, probably a Kirk Douglas-style call to arms – “I am ‘everyday people.’”

Its message was presumably not lost on the teenage Nile Rodgers. While in hospital earlier this year I read several books to help pass the time and get me back to sanity, and one of those was Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny, Rodgers’ autobiographical memoir. At times an exhilarating read, at other times unreadable (as in: this is not the sort of thing you should read while in hospital), Rodgers is nevertheless razor-sharp in his recollections, and reckons that the We Are Family album is the best thing that the Chic Organization ever did.

Once Chic had established themselves as a big act, Atlantic Records offered their roster of artists to them, inviting Rodgers and Bernard Edwards to take their pick. But they knew that if they scored a hit with, say, the Stones or Bette Midler, they would not be recognised for their contribution. Rodgers and Edwards therefore asked to work with Atlantic’s least established act, the Philadelphia girl group Sister Sledge.

“We Are Family” was the first song Chic had ever written for anyone other than themselves; when Rodgers and Edwards wrote it, they had not even met the group and based the lyric on the then President of Atlantic’s description of them. But it worked; the record sounds excited and spontaneous, with an increasingly hoarse-voiced but clearly enthusiastic lead vocal by the then nineteen-year-old Kathy Sledge (apparently recorded in one take). It also sounds a little sad, which is in keeping with the circuitous chord sequence of the chorus – A7, G, D7, G4 (seventh and then ninth augmentations) and finally back to A7 – but the overall and overwhelming feeling is one of celebration of difference, not just of the people who we are but the people we are not. Thus the Pittsburgh Pirates could use the song as their theme for the 1979 season, thus disco (that province of the different) ruled and, in the end, prevailed. An anthem to compare with other anthems, the ones about the dawn’s early light, and so on and so on. 

Date Record Made Number Two: 16 June 1979
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 2 
Record At Number One: “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer
UK Chart Position: 8 (original run), 5 (1993 remix)

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