“Me And Baby Brother” by War

War wrote and recorded "Me and Baby Brother" for their 1973 album Deliver the Word, though the song had already shown up two years earlier as "Baby Brother", a live cut on All Day Music. Howard E. Scott, Jerry Goldstein and Lonnie Jordan produced the studio take, and it barrels along like a block party that refuses to wind down, loose and hard-charging in the same breath.

In 1974 it rose to 15 among US pop singles and 18 on the R&B side, cracked the Canadian top 10, and got a second wind in 1976, when a UK reissue reached 21 there. Its echoes keep turning up in unlikely places: Killing Joke have acknowledged how closely their song "Change" resembles it, and a sample of it runs through the "Stardust Speedway" music in Sonic CD.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.