Sly and the Family Stone

Sylvester Stewart — DJ, producer, writer, bandleader — assembled the Family Stone as a genuinely integrated unit: Black and white, male and female, playing together at a moment when that was itself a statement. Operating from San Francisco in the late 1960s, they absorbed the psychedelic scene around them and poured it into a funk-soul synthesis that was warmer, stranger and more inclusive than anything coming from Motown or Stax.

“Everyday People” (1968) preached togetherness and went to Number One. Their Woodstock performance in August 1969, before half a million people, was one of the festival’s peaks. Then the world changed: urban unrest, Vietnam, harder drugs, and Sly’s own withdrawal produced There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1971) — its grooves deliberately murky, paranoid, unresolved, as stark a contrast to the earlier optimism as could be imagined, and as influential on its own terms.

“Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” (1970) sits between the two phases: a relentless funk groove that stripped the sound down to something James Brown’s bands might have played, pointing forward to the bass-heavy psychedelic funk of George Clinton and ultimately to hip-hop’s appropriation of those same grooves.