People Everyday - Metamorphosis Mix

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.)