Best Ever
Soul Album?

The drums on There’s a Riot Goin’ On sound wrong. They’re muffled, distorted, run through machines until they lose their snap. The bass doesn’t pop — it oozes. The horns, when they appear, seem to be playing from another room. Sly Stone took the tightest band in America and made them sound like they were dissolving. It was 1971, and the party was over.

This was supposed to be the follow-up to Stand!, which had given the world “Everyday People” and “I Want to Take You Higher” — utopian funk anthems that imagined a world where everyone could dance together. Three years later, Sly delivered something else entirely: a record about what happens when the utopia doesn’t arrive. The title track is listed at 0:00. Silence. There’s a riot goin’ on, and you can’t hear it. Or maybe the silence is the riot.

The recording process has become legend. Sly holed up in his Bel Air mansion, surrounded by hangers-on and drugs, layering tracks on a four-track recorder while the rest of the band waited to be called. Often they weren’t. He played most of the instruments himself, building songs from loops and overdubs, pioneering techniques that wouldn’t become standard until hip-hop. The result sounds both overcrowded and empty — too many ideas fighting for space, none of them quite connecting.

“Family Affair” was the hit, and it’s a Trojan horse. The groove is undeniable — that drum machine pattern, those choked guitar stabs — but the lyrics are bitter beneath the surface. “One child grows up to be somebody that just loves to learn / And another child grows up to be somebody you’d just love to burn.” This is not a celebration of family. It’s a clear-eyed accounting of how families fail, how people drift, how love curdles. It went to number one anyway.

“Luv N’ Haight” buries its hooks under layers of murk. “(You Caught Me) Smilin’” drags a love song through mud until it sounds like resignation. “Spaced Cowboy” floats on a rhythm that keeps threatening to fall apart. Nothing on this album is easy. The funk is there — Sly couldn’t not be funky — but it’s funk as endurance test, funk that makes you work for the groove.

The politics are implicit rather than explicit. By 1971, the Black Panther Party was under siege, the Vietnam War was grinding on, the optimism of the late ’60s had curdled into paranoia and exhaustion. Sly didn’t write protest songs about any of this. He just made a record that sounded like how it felt — the heaviness, the suspicion, the sense that the walls were closing in. The music is the message.

The influence took decades to register. At the time, critics were baffled; this wasn’t what Sly Stone was supposed to sound like. But hip-hop producers heard something in that murky mix — the way the drums sat, the emphasis on texture over clarity. D’Angelo’s Voodoo is a direct descendant. So is Erykah Badu’s work, and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. They all learned from Sly that you could make music that felt bad and still be irresistible.

Put it on late at night, when you’re not sure how you feel about anything. Let “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa” stretch out over seven minutes of churning, hypnotic repetition. The groove is there. It’s just not going to make it easy for you.

The party’s over. The music continues.

Sly Stone: The Best Ever is funk as survival. Is There’s a Riot Goin’ On the Best Ever Psychedelic Soul Album? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• The original Epic CD release has a rawness later remasters smoothed away.
• The 2007 remaster adds clarity without losing the murk — the definitive version.
• The vinyl reissue restores the gatefold artwork and lets the bass breathe.