Sly Stone's biggest songs tell us everything about his impact on modern music and culture

Australia Broadcast Center

6 hours ago

The tragic truth is that Sly Stone's recording career was only a very short part of his life.
The singer and bandleader, who died this week at 82, was a groundbreaking figure in popular culture of the 1960s and 70s known for his open-minded approach to creating music.
His band, Sly & the Family Stone, was one of the first prominent mixed-race, mixed-gender, mixed-genre bands to gain mainstream support. They broke musical boundaries as well as social ones, bringing rock'n'roll, funk and soul together in a heady melange we now take for granted.
His work hasn't just influenced artists over the past 60 years, it has provided the architecture for so much modern music. Funk, soul, hip hop and even pop music have all been shaped in some way by the leaps made by Sly Stone's band, who broke the mould at a time when such behaviour was unheard of.
While much of his life was marred by drug addiction and homelessness due to financial mismanagement, the impact he had on music has never dulled. The music and the message has remained relevant for decades.
Here are five songs to start with if you're not yet across some of the biggest moments Sly Stone gave us in his early career.
Sly and the Family Stone's debut album, A Whole New Thing, didn't sell a lot of copies upon release and didn't garner the same critical acclaim that would come with their next albums.
They came out of the gates strongly though, 'Underdog' — the first track from their first album — set the tone for the energy they were set to inject into American pop culture in the coming years.
Recorded live, it's a clear display of the band's sheer brilliance as individual musicians and as a unit. The song sounds like a party from the moment they all kick in after its 'Frère Jacques' intro, and Sly Stone sounds every bit the formidable leader he was as he barks about the feeling of being underrated and under-appreciated.
It's a brilliant piece of music, and that was clearly enough for Sly Stone to realise success was worth chasing.
After failing to shift the needle on their first album, Sly Stone took his band in more of a pop direction on second album 1968's Dance To The Music. The band was good, they just hadn't captured the public's attention yet. The title track, which opens the album, took care of that.
While they were unapologetically shooting for broader audiences, that didn't stop them from breaking ground.
This is the song perhaps most responsible for the explosion of psychedelic soul music that was to come in its wake. Rock bands began to embrace the grooves and spirit of soul music, soul groups dug into the freedom and experimentation that came with psychedelic rock and, perhaps most importantly, the listening public got used to these worlds colliding.
If 'Dance To The Music' was the band's introduction to a mainstream audience, 'Everyday People' was — and still is — the song that would cement them in the annals of pop culture forever.
The band's first number one single is the most prominent example of the peaceful politics that drove much of the band's early work. It remains an anthem for equality almost 60 years later and perhaps speaks to the band's ethos more clearly than any of their work.
That it was a hit was no accident. Stone knew precisely what he was doing.
"I didn't just want 'Everyday People' to be a song, I wanted it to be a standard," he wrote in his 2023 autobiography Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).
"Something that would be up there with 'Jingle Bells' or 'Moon River'. And I knew how to do it. It meant a simple melody with a simple arrangement to match."
At just two minutes long, it feels like it's all over before it begins. While it doesn't overstay its welcome, that simple melody sticks in your head well after the track is over.
'Everyday People' is still everywhere in pop culture, thanks largely to its appearances in TV advertisements and innumerable cover versions, the latest of which to go viral features pop icon Cher and mumble rap superstar Future.
Sly's lyrics start to sound a bit more paranoid and cautious at this point, as he sings of a wrestle with the devil, later proclaiming that "Flamin' eyes of people fear burnin' into you" and how "dyin' young is hard to take, sellin' out is harder".
As for that title: it's more than sensational spelling for the sake of it.
"Mice, elf, small humble things that were reminders of how big the rest of the world was," he wrote in his autobiography.
"You had to stand up straight to be seen at all. And there were forces working against standing up straight. I tried to get to them in the lyrics."
This song has perhaps the most practical example of the immense musical impact of this group: it is widely considered the song that introduced the concept of slap bass, courtesy of Larry Graham, a style of playing omnipresent through various genres of music to this day.
Thanks to that, the influence of this song is too broad to accurately chart, but the clearest example is probably Janet Jackson's career-defining song 'Rhythm Nation', which is built from a sample of this track.
In 1971, the civil rights movement was losing momentum, flower power and the energy it had inspired was also waning, and Sly Stone's lifelong battle with drug addiction was beginning to take a serious toll, leading to infighting, missed concerts, and general unreliability that hampered his personal and working relationships.
On their dark fifth album, There's A Riot Goin' On, Sly and the Family Stone threw the positivity of their late-60s records in the fire and turned in a series of druggy, pessimistic takes on modern life.
It's a dour but brilliant record and its centrepiece, 'Family Affair', remains one of Stone's finest works and biggest hits. His lyrics, about the complexities of familial love, aren't groundbreaking but its chorus, sung by Sly's sister Rose Stone, makes it both sweet and sad in a haunting kind of way.
The tensions within the band meant the line-up on this track wasn't the Family Stone as they'd previously existed. Billy Preston, fresh from his turn with The Beatles, played keys, Bobby Womack played guitar, while a drum machine replaced founding drummer Greg Errico. Admittedly, this primitive electronic beat-making proved hugely influential on the development of hip hop years later.
It's been covered extensively: Lou Reed's version is the pick, though takes from reggae pop star Shabba Ranks and Aussie favourite Stephen Cummings warrant investigation too. It's also been heavily sampled: most notably in the Black Eyed Peas 2000 jam 'Weekends'.