There's a riot goin' on
"Don't hate the black, don't hate the white. If you get bitten, just hate the bite," Sly Stone advised American in 1968. You can make it if you try, different strokes for different folks, and you don't have to die before you live are a mere few of the optimist messages spread in songs by Sly and the Family Stone during the heady days of the Summer of Love and Woodstock. Then times... changed. By the 1971 release of the stylishly mournful masterpiece There's a Riot Goin' On, the man who once sang of hot fun in the summertime warned, "Watch out 'cause the summer gets cold / When today gets too old." Riot laid a sonic backdrop for the nationwide cultural and political disintegration of 1960s fallout, as well as the personal dissolution of disallusioned idealist Sly Stone
Print Book, English, 2006
Continuum, New York, 2006