WHAT'S GOING ON? THERE'S A RIOT GOIN' ON

In 1971, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On were released within six months of each other, two sonically different takes on the same socially and politically divided landscape. Both albums are revolutionary statements, but There's a Riot Goin' On chose the grittier approach, reflecting the fear, paranoia, and disenchantment felt at the time by both Black America as a whole and by Sly Stone himself, who withdrew into isolation and drug abuse during the making of the album.

If you open any one of your screens today, the riot hasn't ended. Political protests, corruption, poverty, addiction, wars abroad and on our own streets, are still ever-present. With the death of Sylvester "Sly" Stone on June 9th, the controlled burn of There's a Riot Goin On serves as a timely backdrop, as so many of us strive to create a better reality than the ones billionaires and politicians continue trying to serve up; the same destructive policies in different wrapping paper.

As Greil Marcus wrote in the April 1972 edition of Creem Magazine, "The success of this 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."

So let's take a page from Sly's book and damn the terms we're being offered and create some new ones. But first, set aside 48 minutes of your day, turn off your screens, and plug into the transcendental sounds of truth, soul, and humanity with Sly and The Family Stone's seminal album, There's a Riot Goin On. Then create a riot of your own.