There's a Riot Goin' On by Sly and the Family Stone
Album #57: There’s a Riot Goin’ On – Sly and the Family Stone
“As I’m growing up, I’m growing down”
At the time of writing this piece, a bunch of Klansmen and neo-Nazis paraded through Charlottesville, Virginia openly and the bloody foment of a year’s tension is getting released in one festering burst of almighty rage. The fact that this album, and all the albums that speak on the black experience, have not changed their tenor in the last 50 years, well, it’s exhausting.
Sly and the Family Stone
My experience of There's a Riot Goin' On, released in 1971, is radically different. When I first listened to this record, I could separate myself from its content. I had trouble with the muddy avant-grooves, that low-down dirty bass getting pushed down into the muddy streets of a fight scene, or the transparent rage bubbling under the skin of the vocals. I was able to rationally view the way the music is not only inaccessible, and the grooves confrontational, but that it was a hard album to like. I was able to take its sludge as a point worthy of criticism.
I’m now less sure of that stance.
Like anything human, I know anger. I know rage that sounds like banging keyboards, and rough, raw sorrow. But good lord, the longer I go on, the more my inability to understand the rage this record presents astounds and saddens me.
This record is the worst kind of timelessness. Its emotions vibrate and resonate with the darkest, Hobbesian impulses, and its borderline lo-fi sound is bred from its aesthetic of late ‘60s race relations. This record is timeless, because we have, as yet, been unable to overcome the anger it presents. We can’t get past that hate, it seems.
This record is timeless, because we have, as yet, been unable to overcome the anger it presents. We can’t get past that hate, it seems.
A long time ago, I made a choice to love everybody, no matter what. It is still the hardest choice I’ve ever made, but I don’t regret it. I love everybody, even if I disagree with them or find their behavior terribly repugnant.
But I can still call a spade a spade: racism exists, racists exist, and we need to work on it.
Until this isn’t a family affair.
R.I.P. Heather Heyer
