Sister Sledge – We Are Family
There are lots of good reasons to dislike a song. I don’t need to list any of them here, especially since there are more good reasons than songs, as two people can dislike a song for equally valid and entirely personal bases. I am firmly in the “there is no bad music” camp if someone – anyone – likes it, so I stand just as firmly with you when you don’t like something. Without being guided by our own taste, what’s the point of art?
But I do know one objectively dumb reason to dislike a song: Because of a baseball team.
Let me explain. I first started following baseball in 1972, which was the year I turned 8. My team was Canada’s one major league entry, the Montreal Expos, and I was soon religiously watching their nationally televised Wednesday night matches. This was not a good time to be an Expos fan: it was their fourth year in existence and the team was not very good. After a brief flash of relevance in 1973, they took a step back, and by 1976 were again the worst team in baseball.
But in this mess, there was hope for the future. That 1976 team included a bunch of youngsters – most notably future Hall of Famers Gary Carter and Andre Dawson – who would be among the leaders of the organization’s first great team in 1979. And when that day came, I was even more glued to my television. When they entered September in the hunt for a playoff spot, our local FM radio station started broadcasting all their games, and I ended up watching or listening to 34 games in 30 days – basically, four days of my life spent drinking tea, eating buttered popcorn (yes, I had rituals) and keeping my own box scores. The Expos ended up being the third best team in all of baseball that year. Unfortunately, the best team was in the same division, so they fell short of the postseason. And I hated that other team. The team was the Pittsburgh Pirates, and they had a theme song: “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge. So, naturally, I had to hate the song. That’s just how these things work.
I had nothing against Sister Sledge before this. Earlier that year, “He’s the Greatest Dancer” had been a disco hit for the four Sledge siblings, and while I have no specific recall of how I felt about the song at the time, hearing it now causes no bad vibes to resurface from my subconscious. It’s actually the opposite, since a pre-cuckolded, Chris-Rock-slapping Will Smith built the verse of “Gettin’ Jiggy wit It” around a sample from the sisters’ first hit, and who wouldn’t be happy to get jiggy?
But “We Are Family” causes a form of PTSD, as I remember one of my first truly intense sports fandom disappointments. Sports was incredibly important to me at the time, and my sense of self worth was ridiculously tethered to some degree to the success or failure of the teams I rooted for. (It was absolutely my father’s fault that this was going on, and I’m not going to let him off the hook just because he isn’t here to defend himself.) Any threat to my team’s winning was an existential threat to myself, and if our rivals drew inspiration from a song, then that song was on my no-play list. It was that simple.
But I did it: I listened to “We Are Family”, and then I listened to it again, and again. It was more than needed for the music, as it isn’t a very complex song, but it may have been good as exposure therapy. Written and produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, it’s like a less interesting Chic record. A syncopated disco beat underlain with metallic piano and a subtle bass line from Edwards, with equally unobtrusive drumming from his bandmate Tony Thompson. It’s a pretty relaxed beat for a dance hit, but that was not unusual for disco tunes: Chic’s own “Good Times” has a drugged-out sluggishness. Yet, despite there being nothing particularly unique about this recording, music critics have regularly ranked it among the best songs of its year (#4 on the Pazz and Jop), decade (some guy named Steve Crawford has it at 101) and all-time (currently ranked at 967 at Acclaimed Music). I don’t hear it, and it can’t just be leftover petulance from 15-year-old me. There’s nothing wrong with the record, and it’s even sort of grown on me since starting to write this post: I just don’t hear greatness anywhere.
My Expos remained a good team for a few years but never managed to win a championship before falling apart over drugs and money, and the stars fell away one by one. After a decade of mostly average and occasionally bad play, they were the best team in baseball in 1994, but a players’ strike ended those hopes, and the franchise never recovered, relocating to Washington after the 2004 season. I remained a loyal fan to the end, but I couldn’t follow them to their new home: my heart had been broken too many times. I had also learned long before then not to get too tied up in things I had no control over, like sports, and to let go of those grudges. That reckoning had come at the hands of a New York Yankees catcher named Butch Wynegar, whose team didn’t have an obnoxious theme song, so that’s all I’m going to say here about that son of a bitch.
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