Sly And The Family Stone
There's A Riot Goin' On

"Feel so good inside myself don't wanna move feel so good inside myself don't need to move" (Luv n' haight)
"Time They say is the answer/ I don't believe it" (Time)

The importance of Sly and the Family Stone in contemporary music is paramount and certainly goes beyond the boundaries of that genre - funk - of which they were the main standard-bearers alongside James Brown, becoming a fetish for entire generations of funk-crazed fans. Consider the influences exerted on the most varied artists: from Miles Davis (who beautifully veered towards funk in the urban fresco of "On the Corner") to Jane's Addiction (in whose crossover the syncopated rhythmic matrix was inspired by Sly: who remembers the seismic version of "Don't call me Nigger, Whitey" played with Ice T at Lollapalooza 91?).
Moreover, the group formed by the charismatic Sylvester Stewart in the mid-Sixties was able to express the spirit of an era, coagulating hopes and subsequently the anxieties of an entire generation, specifically the plethora of educated Black youth at the peak of Martin Luther King's libertarian thrusts: the group's dazzling performance at Woodstock has gone down in history for that as well.

Released in 1971, "There's a riot going on" deserves the accolade of Family masterpiece. In that year, black music was experiencing a phase that was nothing short of prolific, among foundational albums like "What's going on" by Marvin Gaye, "Where I'm coming from" by Stevie Wonder, the third "Live at Apollo" by James Brown, not to mention the acrobatic debut of Funkadelic and the charisma of Curtis Mayfield, while the matured Jimi Hendrix had reclaimed his black roots before dying (reshaping them). The historical and social context was also decisive: from the excitement and integrationist hopes of the late '60s, there was a transition to the confusion that would lead to disillusionment, the great chill of the '70s, loaded with oppressive drugs and despair. Chemical abuses were beginning to undermine the harmony of the family and the leader's balance, casting a sinister shadow over everything.
All this converged into an epochal work. The developments in black music were an incentive for a burst of energy, detaching from that sunny blend of soul, rock, R&B, and psychedelia mostly appreciated by a white audience. What immediately strikes one about "There's a riot goin on" is indeed the exoticism, the creation of a sophisticated and dark mixture able to read excitements, uprisings, and contradictions of the ghettoized black communities in the USA metropolises through the evocation of ancestral African spirits. Tracks like "Africa talks to you _ The Asphalt jungle" or "Thank you for talking to me Africa" are emblematic in this sense and constitute a fierce and desperate cry of black pride, a foundational archetype for black culture in the following decades. The music fully reflects this turning point: both in episodes where a spirited and sly groove echoes ("Family affair", "You caught me smiling", "Luv n' haight", "Spaced cowboy", and "Just like a baby"), and in those where a hypnotic and esoteric drift is evident (the delirious "Time", "Poet", "Brave & Strong", the already mentioned "Thank you for talking to me Africa") the sound matter handled by the group is now indefinable: a lustrous jungle, a painting by Douanier Rousseau in motion, where vivid guitars, feverish keyboards, pulsating bass lines, shamanic vocals, and slithering horns form a perfectly interlocking symphony, captivating and uncompromising at the same time.

The magic wouldn't last long, and the departures of Gerry Errico and Larry Graham and the drugs undermined the subsequent "Fresh": the chill of the '70s extinguished the warmth of these voodoo rites. But the essence had been captured.
Greil Marcus wrote about "There's a Riot goin' on": "It is Muzak with its finger on the trigger". We wholeheartedly agree.