A Year of Blind Spots: We Are Family

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

We Are Family

Sister Sledge

1979

The maxim that some songs are better in the context of an album has never been tested more mightily than it is for the worn-out long-turned-hokey family beef and beer classic, "We Are Family." At this point, you can barely even call the goddamn thing a song. It's sonic wallpaper for half-drunk aunts and Dunkin Donuts-sponsored local Thanksgiving Day parades. It's been stripped of any emotional weight it may have originally had. It's about as poignant as "Happy Birthday." And now you're telling me to take it seriously?

I mean, okay, I did this to myself. The curiosity got the better of me. Yes, "We Are Family" is about as artistically flat as Subway's Five Dollar Footlong jingle, but could there be more to Sister Sledge than just that? And could the song find some way to survive and even thrive if surrounded by other songs of its era, ones that don't sound as devoid of feeling as the tones that play on the little machine on the 67 bus when I swipe my TrailPass?

Yes, of course, of course. When your ears know a song as well as they know "We Are Family," that's a sure-tell sign that your brain knows practically nothing. I didn't need to know, but now that I'm listening to the full album, I want to know. And what I've found is that this is a Chic album. This is not to discredit the Sledge sisters, who are clearly talented (and allegedly taught my grandmom how to dance). But the dudes behind Chic, Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, wrote all the songs on this album. I'm also not discrediting Chic when I say that the singers in Chic were in the same position as the sisters in Sister Sledge. They performed the songs, while Edwards and Rodgers wrote them and played the instruments. I'm not saying that this devalues the music in any way! I'm just giving context here. The album We Are Family sounds the way it sounds because it was written by Edwards and Rodgers, who have a style and a sound and even someone like me can hear We Are Family as a middle ground between "Le Freak" and diana.

That "Edwards/Rodgers sound" can be described very simply as "disco." We Are Family was released six months before Disco Demolition Night, so these were the waning days. "We Are Family" specifically may have escaped the explosion on the baseball field, since that same MLB season saw the eventual World Series Champions the Pittsburgh Pirates choose this song as their victory anthem, guaranteeing that "We Are Family" would play on stadium speakers at least until the October following the night that disco records were literally destroyed with dynamite while disco was figuratively destroyed by dynamite.

I don't give a shit about the '79 Pirates, so it ain't just them that kept this goddamn song around. I think it's cliché in all the right ways, with the appeal to "family" being pretty common across many cultures, from car thieves to mafiosos. It's catchy, which makes it a party song, and it speaks to the people who you might typically party with ("party" should be in quotes, I guess). It's lame, is basically what I'm getting at. Context made it lame, and it's been lame for so long that I don't really know if it was ever not lame.

Still, I'll admit that the maxim was true—maybe "We Are Family" didn't gain new life in the context of the album, but it was certainly more tolerable for me than it's been in decades. The other seven songs ranged from serviceable to great. I didn't know what to expect with this thing, but if I had known it was an Edwards/Rodgers affair, I would've known exactly what to expect, and I would not have been disappointed. Lots of grooving bass lines and chicken-scratch rhythm guitars and all that good stuff that makes disco age so surprisingly well. I even recognized one of the other songs—well, the main groove at least, on "He's the Greatest Dancer," since Will Smith sampled it for "Gettin' Jiggy wit It." And the ballads are pretty good, all things considered—that probably has more to do with Kathy Sledge et al. than it does the songwriting team who was churning this shit out, but still.

I don't think I'm walking away thinking that this is a great album, but it's very good. And I don't think I'm walking away thinking that the title track has been suddenly redeemed, because it hasn't. It's still the same First Holy Communion party bullshit that it always was. But I think there is value in, I dunno man, seeing this song surrounded by other songs that I don't know like the back of my hand, that are new and fresh to me, and exciting. The excitement rubs off on "We Are Family," just a little bit. Especially since I was familiar with the concept of the "Chic sound." By being able to now place that hackneyed party anthem in the context of late-stage disco, I am able to see it for what it really is: a pretty good, pretty okay, kinda decent song.