People Everyday

Album

Apples, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie

Label

Chrysalis Records

Genre

Hip hop

Composer(s)

Sylvester Stewart;Speech;Bob James

Entered Chart

Aug 15, 1992

Peak Date

Oct 10, 1992

Released

Unknown

Recorded

Unknown

Catalog #

Chrysalis 50397

B-Side

(Metamorphosis mix) / Children Play With Earth

This is a variation on the song Everyday People by Sly & The Family Stone. Arrested Development lead vocalist Speech wrote this song. He says of the lyrical content: "It came from real life experiences. At that time I lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is where I was born. And Milwaukee, essentially, back in those days, was a very conservative town. And a lot of the black people there really were not into cultural black... they understood they were black, but for them black was jheri-curls, it was pimping, and that's what they thought black culture was mainly about. For me having experienced more in Atlanta and having traveled a little bit more, I'd come to understand that black culture had a lot more to do with Africa, and it was different hairstyles that we could express ourselves with, like dreadlocks and braids. So I would dress like that, and a lot of the people around me in Milwaukee would sort of mock it. And so the song was really just talking about this tension between one concept of culture and another concept of culture." Although it had the same lyrics and structure, the album version of this song is not the one that was a hit. Says Speech: "I would later do a remix of the song once we decided to release it as a single. I felt a little insecure about putting out a single without me rhyming in a sing-song style, because certain people liked this sort of new way I was rapping which had more melody as opposed to just rapping without using melody. So I was really afraid, I wanted to try my hand at making 'People Everyday' a more melodic type of delivery instead of the regular delivery. And so I did a remix and sampled a Bob James record ("Tappan Zee") for the general groove, added some beats to it, and that that was the version of that song that everybody knows about. It was actually a remix." (Check out our full interview with Speech.)

See I was resting at the park minding my own
Business as I kick up the treble tone
On my radio tape player box, right
Just loud enough so folks could hear it's hype, see?
Outta nowhere comes the woman I'm dating
Investigation maybe she was demonstrating
But nevertheless I was pleased
My day was going great and my soul was at ease
Until a group of brothers started bugging out
Drinking the 40 oz, going the nigga route
Disrespecting my black queen
Holding their crotches and being obscene
At first I ignored them cause see I know their type
They got drunk and got guns and they wanna fight
And they see a young couple having a time that's good
And their egos wanna test a brother's manhood
So they came to test Speech cause of my hair-do
And the loud bright colors that I wear
I was a target cause I'm a fashion misfit
And the outfit that I'm wearing brothers dissing it
Well I stay calm and pray the niggas leave me be
But they're squeezing parts of my date's anatomy
Why, Lord, do brothers have to drill me?
Cause if I start to hit this man he'll have to kill me

I am everyday people

I told the niggas please let us pass, friend
I said please cause I don't like killing Africans
But he wouldn't stop and I ain't Ice Cube
But I had to take the brother out for being rude
And like I said before I was mad by then
It took three or four cops to pull me off of him
But that's the story y'all of a black man
Acting like a nigga and get stomped by an African

I am everyday people