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In May 1971, Marvin Gaye released what many consider his greatest album, What’s Going On? It’s a musical cycle told from the perspective of a Vietnam veteran returning to the United States after serving overseas and witnessing much suffering, violence, and injustice. It’s not an idealized album. However, the probing nature of its title and the question it raises suggest a belief in America held, if not by Gaye himself, then certainly by the character he created to guide listeners through the many anxieties the album evokes. We are meant to understand that the soldier in question has left one place to fight a war in another and, upon returning home, has found no improvement over the conditions he left behind.
By November of that year, Sly Stone seemed to have answered: “There’s a riot going on.” At the time of the album’s release, Stone, who passed away this week at the age of 82, was at a critical juncture in his career. He and his band, Sly and the Family Stone, a multi-ethnic outfit that symbolized the utopian euphoria of the late Sixties, had finished the previous decade on a high with the widely acclaimed album Stand! Their performance at Woodstock had left their label, Epic Records, eager for their next release. By 1971, however, all that had been released were a handful of singles and a greatest hits album. Stone had not completed the recordings. His relationship with the band had begun to deteriorate, amid creative differences, drug abuse, and Sly’s erratic behavior. In this context, the song “There's a Riot Goin' On” was a real revelation for him, as if he had just woken up from a long sleep, looked around the country and realized that he could no longer continue to live the way he had before.
There's a Riot Goin' On was almost the opposite of the more optimistic, commercially oriented beginnings of Sly and the Family Stone's early career. Stand! was recorded at Pacific High Studios in San Francisco. Only days after its release, Bloody Thursday occurred, when police suppressed anti-war protests in Berkeley, killing one person and injuring at least one hundred twenty-eight. Still, Stand! exuded a kind of unquenchable optimism, with stirring instrumentation that framed lyrics that were sometimes vague and unclear. It closes with “You Can Make It If You Try,” which exudes confidence that fate can change for any of us. In the period between Stand! and There's a Riot Goin' On, Stone faced increasing pressure from the Black Panthers, whose leaders wanted him to become more politically outspoken and disband his group. The idealism of the sixties faded, and with it came the harsh realities of the new era: political assassinations, rising police violence, the precarious state of the civil rights movement, and a sense of disillusionment that seemed to haunt Stone as he searched for meaning beyond the glory of hippie culture.
The groove on Riot was deeper and darker, with vocal clashes that sometimes barely resembled language. The album was a kind of mapping out of apathy that felt like a reflection of Sly’s lived reality—a kind of rage that led to confusion and then exhaustion—and an homage to the hippie movement that asked where it had left people and who it had left behind. On the opener, “Luv N’ Haight,” Sly’s voice is a distorted mumble as he sings the opening lyrics, “So good inside of me / Don’t wanna move.” As the song progresses, it becomes a polyphonic conflict of feelings: feeling so good feeling so good want to move want to move versus feeling so good inside of me don’t wanna move. It’s hard to tell where one phrase ends and the other begins, or even whether the two statements contradict each other. They coexist in the same confused consciousness: We have to do something; we don’t know what it is. There's a sense of both determination and resignation throughout the album, a heartache that almost seems to echo the hopeful conclusion of “Stand!” Now, through gritty, dark instrumentals, Stone hints that you, like him, may have dreamed of something.
The lyrics weren’t necessarily pessimistic, and not all of them were overtly political, but they had an undertone of a certain cynicism that seemed to be sweeping the country. On “Just Like a Baby,” Sly moans in a low register over a whining keyboard riff and a lo-fi drum machine about betrayal, about crying because he knows when he’s been lied to. The song is based on “you” — “I feel it when you lie to me” — and that “you” could, of course, be a specific person. But it could also seem like Sly is questioning an entire city, a country, or a set of ideals. Riot was, among other things, an album about betrayals. On “Time,” Sly ends with a half-growl, “time, they say, is the answer,” before letting out a little chuckle and then a high-pitched thump.
Sourse: newyorker.com
