There's a Riot Goin' On: Muzak with Its Finger on the Trigger
Sly and the Family Stone: Creem, April 1972
A lot of nonsense has been written about There’s a riot goin’ on, the first album Sly Stone has made in two years. People don’t like it because it’s not groovy. Tough shit. Tell it to Robert Johnson.
You better come on,
in my kitchen
It’s going to be
raining outdoors
“Can’t you play no boogie?”
I got to keep moving,
I got to keep moving
Blues falling down like hail,
blues falling down like hail
I can’t keep no money
There’s a hellhound
on my trail
Well, now, that was the Thirties. And what did it have to do with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers? Not much, maybe. But Johnson’s sensibility, had it surfaced then, might have scarred the dominant culture of the nation like a jar of acid thrown in America’s face. What does Sly’s new music have to do with the congratulatory rites of three-record Bangla Desh, of Sly’s own victory in the Battle of the Bands at Woodstock? About as much, and in the same way.
There’s a riot goin’ on is an exploration of and a pronouncement on the state of the nation, Sly’s career, black music, and black politics. It begins where “Everybody is a star,” left off, and it asks:
So what?
This album contains, in a matrix of parody and vicious self-criticism, virtually all of the images that Sly gave to us as an audience and which we cherish. The new music calls all of the old music and our reasons for claiming it in the first place into question. It is Sly’s equivalent of Van Morrison’s Blowin’ your mind, his first solo album, where Van reached for the grotesque because it seemed the only adequate description of everyday life; of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, in that Sly is escaping his own past; and of Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, though Sly is working with much greater sophistication and control. Instead of merely orchestrating his confessions, he has transformed them into a devastating work of art, that deeply challenges anyone who ever claimed to be a part of his audience.
Sly take us higher! we cry.
And Sly comes back: Why?
Dance to the music, Sly said. We paid him to say it; it was his job, like selling insurance. He began to question that. And the questions were:
What music? What dance?
Stand! had all the drive and machinery of a big semi-truck, and listening to it made you feel like you were in the driver’s seat, like you owned the road. Nice feeling, mastery, until you realize the road belongs to someone else. So this album is about getting off the truck. The mood is one of standing still, taking a stroll and looking carefully at the street instead of letting it flash by in a riot of color and motion, and finally, about running, if only as fast as you can on your own. You can be caught.
Lookin’ at the devil,
Grinnin’ at his gun.
Fingers start shakin’,
I begin to run.Bullets start chasin’
I begin to stop
We begin to wrestle
I was on the top.—Thank you for talkin’ to me africa
The song is played slowly. Bump-bump, bump-bump. The words are buried in a slurred half-chant. When Sly sings “Thank you falettinme be mice elf agin” there is contempt in his voice that goes beyond the sarcasm the words imply.
Notice how the words read. The words Sly has written for this album stand up on a page better than anything I can recall, with the exception of Don Van Vliet’s lyrics and a few stray Dylan songs, like “Visions of Johanna.” The images are perfectly developed, the songs achieving an eerie balance, and not one image is wasted. One song here, “Poet,” has been called pretentious, because it says things like, “I’m a songwriter, Oh yeh a poet.” The song is intentionally crude—Sly is parodying his career all through this album—but in the end such a song is pretentious only if it is false. The words on this album are better “poetry” than anything the “rock poets” have written. The “rock poets” are all of them white, of course, because we think in neat racial categories and “black” is not part of that category. Out of all the nonsense about the poetry of Neil Young or even Bob Dylan no one has said anything about Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing.” The question is how a writer uses language to make words do things they ordinarily do not do, how she tests the limits of language and alters and extends the ordinary impact of images. The music here flattens out what Sly has written, hiding it. So it peeks out, for the most part, and only occasionally, as with “Family Affair,” does it jump out and hit you in the face. It is a measure of Sly’s determination to get his difficult new music across that two of his songs here, “Family affair” and “Runnin’ away,” are perfectly crafted hit singles, in terms of their musical accessibility, while being just as subversive in terms of what they say as the rest of it.
Lookin’ at the devil,
Grinnin’ at his gun.
Fingers start shakin’,
I begin to run.Bullets start chasin’
I begin to stop
The eye is working here, taking in the scene at the edge of action. The description is minimal and the economy is absolute. Then the eye turns and the listener is given only a vague sense of physical motion, a body aware of itself with the precision of the eye in the first three lines. “I begin to stop.” You feel the slowing down, and the endless decisions and hesitations involved in turning to face the gun again. It all moves very slowly. You are in the song, breathing its risk.
There is an enormous reality to this album, a slow, level sense of getting by. It is muzak with its finger on the trigger; the essence of the rhythms James Brown has been exploring these past years without the compensations of Brown’s showmanship or his badass lyrics. It is a reality of day-to-day sameness and an absence of variety—like prison—which requires, if one is to endure it, either a deadening of all the senses or a sharpening of them, so that the smallest change of mood or event can be noticed and seized on as representing something novel or meaningful. It is a matter of deriving meaning from the monotony of social life, “the mud,” Sly calls it, instead of escaping it or denying its existence. So if you listen to this album for a while, you get sharper, and you begin to hear what the band is hearing. Finally this album bears the same relationship to most of the music being made today as The Prison Letters of George Jackson do to Confidential. The second is easier to get into, but nothing is there.
On this album the singing must be taken as an element of the sound—to talk about “the vocals” would only be to falsify the ideas at work on Riot and make the music that much more difficult to hear. Voices stretch words and play with them until they have been drained of their ordinary meanings just as the guitars, bass, horns and organ reduce the sensational cliches of the music Sly has made in the past to bone. The superstar clothes are removed, piece by piece.
Sly’s idea is of a band as a means to each member finding his own voice; while he is the source of vision, the emotion of every singer, his included, has always been authentic precisely because that vision is shared. I think this is so because Sly’s vision, whether one of affirmation, as in the past, or of negation, as it mostly is at this point, is always an attempt at liberation. It is then, Sly’s musical authority that sets his singers free. The singing on Sly’s previous records and on this one—complex, personal, unpredictable—really is something new. As opposed to the Temptations or the Jackson Five, whose records have not been so much inspired by Sly’s sound as they have formalized it, just as earlier Motown imposed order on the dangerous Antonomian spontaneity of gospel, what you hear in Sly Stone’s music is a number of individuals who have banded together in a group because that is the way they can best express themselves as individuals. It’s the freedom of the street, not the church.
This was made explicit in “Everybody Is a Star.” That meant not that everyone lives in the spotlight, but that every man and woman finds moments of visibility appropriate to what he or she has to give. It is an idea that has everything to do with balance, and the white version of it, the “rock jam,” has produced mostly narcissism or revealed that many have very little to say after all. On There’s a riot goin’ on Sly has taken this aesthetic, of the group that sings like a band plays, away from the context of celebration, which had seemed not only appropriate but necessary to it, and made it the means to a dramatization of events and moods that are bitter, mocking, and scary. On a purely musical level this is probably the greatest triumph of the new music, for nothing is more difficult than making the old form deliver new truths. The equality is still there: no one is a star.
In “Family affair,” so direct in its musical impact and so elusive in its meanings, Sly comes close to a conventional lead vocal, but he is singing about the need to lean on other people. It is singing that demonstrates, I think, a greater commitment to his material than anything he has done before. This is a man who knows exactly what he is talking about.
Both kids are good to Mom
You see, it’s in the blood
Blood’s thicker than the mud
The words are sung from a distance; Sly is preaching here, trying to explain something that matters. Some people give up on you, some don’t no matter what you do. Sometimes it becomes important to find out who’s who. He is presenting this to the Top 40 audience for their own benefit, like a philosophy lesson. Holding knowledge out for our consideration. One chance to get it.
It’s a family affair
You don’t know
who turned you in
The bonds of the peculiar aesthetic democracy of this group have held in order to reveal a world of betrayal and falsehood. With this album Sly is giving his audience—particularly his white audience—precisely what they don’t want. What they want from Sly is an upper, not a portrait of what lies behind his big freaky black superstar grin. One gets the feeling, listening to this album, that Sly’s disastrous concerts of the past year have not been so much a matter of insulting his audience as attacking it, with real bitterness and hate, because of what its demands on him have forced him to produce. It is an attack on himself as well, for having gone along with those demands. All through this record Sly turns on himself:
Must be a rush for me
To see a lazy
A brain he meant to be
Cop out?—The Asphalt Jungle
He removes the question mark in the next verse, and ultimately he covers the question with poison:
Dyin’ young is hard to take
Sellin’ out is harder
The words are shoved into a corner under the graveyard chorus, “Thank you, falettinme be mice elf Agin,” and we begin to see why this record is so hard to listen to, which is to say, hard to take.
The very best pop music demonstrates a real absorption of events, political as well as personal. The spirit of Sly’s earlier music is the spirit of Martin Luther King’s speeches mixed with the fire of riots in Watts and Detroit. This record represents the end of that, too, and Sly’s attempt, slow, hesitant, despairing, and affirmative only at the thinnest margin, to create a new music appropriate to new realities. It is music that has as much to do with the Marin Shootout and the death of George Jackson as the earlier sound had to do with the fierce pride that grew out of the riot that the title track of this album says is no longer going on.
Frightened faces to the wall—
Oh Can’t you hear your Mama call?
The Brave and Strong—
Survive! Survive!—Brave and Strong
Those faces to the wall are Panthers forced to strip naked on the streets of Philadelphia so Frank Rizzo and his cops can gawk and laugh and make jokes about big, limp cocks while the Panther women, shoved up against the wall with their men, are psychologically raped. The picture was widely published. You may have forgotten it; Sly has not. That again is why this album is hard to take. If its spirit is that of the death of George Jackson it is not a celebration of that man’s greatness, but the mood you feel when you are shoved back into the corners of loneliness and you really have to think about dead flesh and cannot play around with the satisfactions of myth.
These events and Sly’s understanding of his own career have come together in a new music of extraordinary depth and power. It is an element of the music that “Gimme Shelter” implied would be crucial to the Seventies. Sly is questioning his earlier music and our love for it; he is implying that whatever the beauty of “Everybody is a star,” that may have been only another way of saying that everybody is a mark. The success of this new album is that it is simultaneously deeply personal and inescapably political, innovative and tough in its music, literate and direct in its words, a parody of the past and a strong and unflinching statement about the present. There is no future tense here. Sly has returned at a time when black music as a whole has reconstituted itself on terms he defined, and he is damning those terms and creating new ones. He has recognized the expectations of his white audience, and he is out to subvert them; blacks are not going to have any trouble understanding this music, which is, finally, a quiet, bitter, open act of rebellion, the resolution of which depends partly on the audience. Its final reaction to this album will be a measure of its seriousness about music and its ability to face a world it never made but that it is going to live in regardless.
Originally published in Creem magazine, April 1972
A terrific piece, Greil, made even more impressive because, though you wrote it all the way back in 1972, it still stands absolutely relevant today.
As does, of course, Sly Stone.
It's rare that a review meets the moment of a momentous album as well as this one does. Thank you, Greil. Thank you, Sly.