There’s a Riot Goin’ On

sly stone’s 1969 LP, Stand! [see No. 119], was full of hope. Its follow-up was the opposite. His voice is an exhausted grumble; the funk in “Family Affair,” “Runnin’ Away,” and especially the closing downward spiral, “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa,” is spare and bleak, fiercely compelling in its anguish over the unfulfilled promises of the Sixties counterculture.