Anti-Climacus

The critical book on Sly & the Family Stone is that their two best albums are There's a Riot Goin' On and Stand!. The latter is, as Amazon would have it, 'a virtual greatest hits album.' Six of the eight songs on the album are represented on the one-cd Anthology, which introduced most of the people I know to Sly Stone et al (Greatest Hits ends in 1970 and so misses all the good latter-period stuff): the omitted songs include the 14-minute funk instrumental "Sex Machine" (bears no relation to the James Brown song) which would never appear on a compilation, no matter how good it was.

The critical book is also that early Sly & the Family Stone is good-time music, happily multiracial and intergender, producing songs about the importance of integration and getting along (cf. "Everyday People"), which turns darker as the 60s become the 70s, as goes the larger cultural narrative. Stand! is the best of the early, happy albums; There's a Riot Goin' On is the best of the later, darker material.

What I've found has been something slightly more complex: it's true that the narrative content of the songs becomes darker, but the musical content becomes notably lighter: there's a wild disconnect in "Runnin' Away" between the lyrics and the song, which is perpetually verging on a soft rock/muzak parody of funk--the thing it reminds me the most are the funkier moments on the last two Belle & Sebastian records--that make for music that is sad and, somehow, consigned to its own sadness.

Stand!, on the other hand, is a monster of a record, one that gets better the louder it gets played because it makes evident the level of craft involved. The Woodstock version of "I Want to Take You Higher" makes it clear that the album version is designed as a series of repeating pieces to be interspersed in live performance with instrumental solos of varying lengths, all controlled by Sly Stone. "Stand!" plays carefully with the spaces in the rhythm to make its last minute possible; "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey" smothers out all the space in the rhythm to excellent effect. And "Sing a Simple Song!" takes--or maybe creates--all those elements of funk--the unified guitar-and-bass line at the beginning of each line, the guitar chord scratches at the end, the horn breakdown, the constantly ascending vocal lines--to simple effect. The song starts in the highest possible gear, and just keeps going higher.