There's a Riot Goin' On by Sly & the Family Stone (1971), № 29 in The Lead-In’s 100 greatest albums. Sly Stone alone with a Maestro Rhythm King drum machine and a Bel-Air mansion full of people who scared him. The first hip-hop album, predating the genre by ten years.
Sly Stone in 1971: heroin-addicted, paranoid, holed up in a Bel Air mansion with a Stewart drum machine and a TEAC reel-to-reel. The follow-up to Stand! that Epic had been begging for. Eleven songs of buried vocals and stretched grooves. The album that ended utopian funk.
Two years after Stand! made Sly & the Family Stone the most-optimistic funk-rock band in America, Sly retreated to a Bel Air mansion and made a deliberately disordered, vocal-buried, drum-machine-driven 48-minute album. The album that ended utopian funk and opened the door to lo-fi production aesthetics.
Sylvester Stewart, Sly Stone, was twenty-eight years old in 1971. He had built one of the most-successful integrated funk-rock bands in America, made three studio albums and a live album, performed at Woodstock to enormous acclaim, and produced an extraordinary run of singles ('Everyday People,' 'Dance to the Music,' 'I Want to Take You Higher,' 'Hot Fun in the Summertime,' 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)'). He had also become heavily dependent on PCP, cocaine, and increasingly heroin. He had moved into a Bel Air mansion he was renting from John Phillips (Mamas & Papas) and had stopped showing up to Family Stone tour dates. Epic Records had been waiting for two years for a follow-up to Stand! (1969).
Recording took place primarily at the Bel Air mansion's basement studio across 1970-1971. Sly recorded most of the album alone, with the Family Stone occasionally appearing for individual tracks but with Sly playing the majority of instruments himself. He used a Stewart drum machine (a primitive analog rhythm box) as the primary percussion source on many tracks; the resulting drum sounds are dry, mechanical, and unusually un-funky for a Sly Stone album.
The album's sonic identity is deliberately disordered. Vocals are mixed low, sometimes barely audible above the instruments. Tracks fade in and out without conventional structure. The Stewart drum machine plays mechanical patterns that feel deliberately unhuman. The arrangements feel improvised rather than composed.
The album's eleven songs are dominated by 'Family Affair' (the album's biggest hit, reached #1 US), 'You Caught Me Smilin',' 'Time,' 'Spaced Cowboy,' 'Runnin' Away,' 'Thank You for Talkin' to Me, Africa' (an eight-minute deconstruction of the band's earlier hit 'Thank You'). The album feels like a slow collapse, both musically and emotionally.
There's a Riot Goin' On belongs at number twenty-nine because it is the album on which a major-label Black funk-rock artist deliberately undermined his own commercial position to make a deliberately dark statement. The album's lo-fi production aesthetic, the buried vocals, the dry drum sounds, the deliberate disorder, is the upstream model for every subsequent lo-fi-as-statement record: Exile on Main St., D'Angelo's Voodoo, Frank Ocean's Blonde. The album opened the door for major-label artists to commit to deliberately uncomfortable production aesthetics. Without it the road to lo-fi and bedroom-pop is closed.
Original 1971 US pressing, Epic KE 30986, a gatefold sleeve with a printed 'Epic Undercover' inner and lyric insert. The cover is Sly's reworked American flag, photographed by Steve Paley, with nine-point suns in place of stars on the canton, the field rendered in red, white and black rather than red, white and blue (a deliberate choice Sly explained as black being the absence of colour). Original shrinkwrap carried a 'Family Affair' hit-single sticker. A clean sealed original is plausibly worth £250 and up.
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