“Landscape” is just one of those words. It’s lost all mouthfeel. It implies a sort of vastness — “the landscape of history,” “the landscape of man,” “the commercial baking landscape.” As craft, it connotes comeliness: “landscape painting.” In action, it exacts beauty through order: a city’s landscaper.
Sly Stone died on Monday, at 82, and there it was again. He “redefined the landscape of pop, funk, and rock music,” declared an official news release. It’s more like landscapes. But who’d deny the gist? I’m sitting here studying a photo of Stone and his band, the Family Stone, five dudes, two chicks, two white, five black. For a racially traumatized America, here was a landscape that redefined “landscape,” too.
The band was his idea, as were their songs. What they redefined was how much sound and rhythm you could pack into three minutes — often, into less. The opening 15 seconds of their first hit, “Dance to the Music,” are a blast, like from a launchpad: Greg Errico beats the skins off his drums while Cynthia Robinson screams for you to get up. The horns sound drunk; Freddie Stone’s guitar sounds like it’s responding to a 9-1-1 call.
Then at about the 16th second — mid-flight — the ascending party halts and a doo-wop parachute opens. Harmony and tambourine lilt to earth, whereupon we’re exhorted to … dance to the music. Lyrically, all that’s happening here is instruction, pronouncement. “I’m gonna add some bottom,” bellows Larry Graham, “so that the dancers just won’t hide,” before his motorific bass lick starts peeling wallflowers off the wall.
This, to paraphrase another Sly gemstone, is a simple song that, musically, teems with, to quote a different gemstone, a vital songwriting and performance philosophy: fun. What else is happening here? Well, the landscapers are celebrating the landscape of themselves. They’re warming up, warming us up, banging out their promise of redefinition. Motown, rock ’n’ roll, gospel, marching band, jazz, lullaby. For about three years, every one their hits was most of all of those: America’s sounds pressed together into radical newness by seven people who dared to embody a utopia that, come 1968, when the band was reaching it apogee, seemed otherwise despoiled. For three years, this band was disillusionment’s oasis.
Earlier this year, Sly received the adulatory-documentary treatment. The film devotes some time to why, by 1971 or so, his international superstardom had begun to wane. You know the culprits: drugs, ego, the toxins of fame. Musically, the buoyancy dissipates. The fizz flattens. The rubber’s gone slack.
Yet his songwriting had deepened. The social politics in the ’60s hits had acquired a knell of personal defeat. Stone would’ve been in his early 30s, and could no longer access the luxury of oasis-making. “Family Affair,” from “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” is the last of the band’s biggest hits, and it’s all low notes and submergence. Errico had left the band, leading Stone to innovate anew by substituting a drum machine in his absence. Ingenuity is what you hear second to mournfulness. The family was coming apart. There was resigned deterioration in the aching funk of Stone’s singing. Now, we arrive at a formal switch, from landscape to group portraiture, the riot outside, the riot within.
Stone’s rubber soul will bounce eternally. Yes, he gave us “Life,” and with it reasons to keep living. That band was a thwapping, bleating, call-and-response monument to hope. Yet I’ve always been fascinated by the post-peak work — on “Riot,” on “Fresh,” on “Small Talk” and “Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I’m Back” — when increasingly Stone turned isolation, static and self-reproach into prophecy.
His genius arises from harmony, his understanding not just of harmonics but human cohesion. It was attuned to the times. The country was splitting apart. As it turns out, he wasn’t a superhuman visionary, like of one of his progeny — he wasn’t Stevie Wonder, whose music could synthesize and sublimate the good and the bad into antidepressant glory. Stone became a kind of blinkered realist. His down-in-the-basement singing could sound depressed.
Among the most pungent moments on these later albums is a version of “Que Sera, Sera.” Stone makes it a gospel dirge, this smoky funeral march. It’s a touch bitter and sopping with rue. “The future’s not ours to see,” he sings, as each verse unspools a childhood anticipation of what might happen someday. Stone imagines a baleful, shrugging acceptance of what is, rather than what’s possible. Possible, this version seems to ask, what’s that?
Needless to say, Sly’s didn’t become a Black Arts anthem. This “visionary genius” thing sounds as if it’s wiping him out. Even today, the band’s “Que Sera, Sera” strikes me as stunningly frank. I no longer hear anybody else’s version. Stone didn’t compose it, of course. He simply did what his art excelled at. He redefined it.
Wesley Morris is a Times critic who writes about art and popular culture.
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