The Surprising Meaning and Origin of ‘I Will Survive’ (2025)

By Oliver Tearle

A song about female empowerment? A classic break-up song? A gay rights anthem? Just exactly what is the meaning of Gloria Gaynor’s disco floor-filler ‘I Will Survive’, which reached the UK number one spot in March 1979?

Actually, the song began as none of these. The main songwriter responsible for ‘I Will Survive’ wrote the track as a response to getting fired from Motown Records. He’d spent seven years working for the company, writing various tracks for artists including Diana Ross and Rare Earth (who I’ve always thought had a band name more befitting a heavy metal group than a soul act: a gag for the chemistry boffins there).

Dino Fekaris, the songwriter in question, was sitting unemployed at home when one of Rare Earth’s songs came on the television (the score for the film Generation, which Fekaris had penned for the group). He took it as a sign, and later recalled jumping down from his bed in a flurry of excitement, saying, ‘I’m going to make it. I’m going to be a songwriter. I will survive!’

So that was the genesis of this disco favourite: a down-on-his-luck songwriter picking himself back up after losing his job and deciding to turn that experience into a rousing anthem about determination and perseverance.

Of course, the song has taken on a life of its own, and Fekaris’ own personal motivation for writing it as a big F*ck You to Motown for sacking him has been superseded by the song’s broader message: a big F*ck You to every horrible ex-partner we have ever escaped from and to every person who has tried to put others down.

If this aligns the message of ‘I Will Survive’ with the message of every punk song written between 1976 and 1979, then that simply draws attention to the limits of both disco and punk as genres. Both emerged in the second half of a decade that had, until then, been something of a barren wilderness for decent pop music (lest we forget just how barren: it was glam rock, Showaddywaddy, and the Bay City Rollers, next to whom even the sodding Wombles looked like a half-serious pop outfit); both were essentially short-lived but very necessary movements which cleared away the moribund dross and acted as the catalyst for the much richer, more diverse and emotionally mature music which came afterwards (synthpop, the New Romantics, New Wave, and post-punk).

But disco and punk themselves, as foundational movements necessary for these later styles to develop at all, had a narrower emotional range. The big disco numbers – not only ‘I Will Survive’ but Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ and Gaynor’s other big hit, ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ – are up-tempo dance numbers with, on the whole, positive and affirmative messages in defiance of the naysayers (although ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ actually works quite well as a flipside to ‘I Will Survive’ in that it’s about a woman being unable to leave a toxic relationship, and as such, somewhat puts a dent in my present thesis).

Still, there are no great slow disco numbers, no ballads or torch songs, and – let’s be honest – none with any truly complex lyrical content.

And even with this in mind, ‘I Will Survive’ stands as a more obvious offering than most, from a lyrical perspective. I’ve never been able to stomach its in-your-face defiance, and this is before we come to its offences against the English language (every schoolchild knows, or ought to know, that it’s ‘lie down and die’: ‘lay’ is the transitive verb, ‘lie’ the intransitive).

Having said that, I’ve always had a certain amount of respect for the line in the first verse about the unwanted lover returning from ‘outer space’, simply for its startling unexpectedness; but this is probably because it’s the only line in the whole song which isn’t an off-the-peg cliché (he says, reaching for a cliché in the process).

The rest of the song is merely a hoovered-up collection of well-worn platitudes about breaking up with someone: thinking you can’t live without someone then finding you can, telling them to walk out the door and leave their key behind, falling apart, mending a broken heart, holding one’s head up high, and, of course, surviving. In my view – and I’m aware I’m clearly in the minority on this, given how consistently popular the track remains – it’s got one of the highest ratio of truisms to original lines in all of popular music. Now that is quite a feat, when you think of it.

And it’s also, perhaps, the key to the song’s success. Sometimes, especially in moments when we need to pick ourselves up from the floor and start rebuilding our lives (sorry, cliché again: this stuff is catching, isn’t it?), we need someone to sing the bleeding obvious at the top of their lungs (and Gloria Gaynor can sing, let’s face it) and shake us out of our self-pity.

The song’s sheer generality and pants-down obviousness has also meant it’s been happily co-opted by gay fans, by women heralding it as a feminist anthem, and by purveyors of breakfast cereals.

Indeed, for all my reservations about the song’s lyrical strengths, for the last 25 years I have always had a strange hankering for some Weetabix whenever I hear ‘I Will Survive’ being played anywhere. Pavlovian conditioning is real, and can last a lifetime. Send help. And failing that, send Weetabix.

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