In May 1971, Marvin Jay released what many consider to have major works, “What is happening?” He narrated a song course from the point of view of one of the old warriors in Vietnam to the United States after serving it abroad, after witnessing all kinds of suffering, violence and injustice, it is not a completely poetic album. However, the curious nature of its title, and the question that leads the work, refers to faith in America, if not by Gaye itself, is certain that it is by the speaker who invents it to direct the listeners through the forest of fears that the album evokes. We have to understand that the soldier concerned left a place to stand in another, and upon returning home, he did not find any improvement in the circumstances he left.
By November of the same year, Sly Stone seemed to offer an answer: “There is a riot.” As this album was released, Stone, who died this week, was at the age of eighty -two, facing a professional turning point or breaking. He and his squad ended, Selly and The Family Stone, the dream band in the late sixties in the late 1960s, the previous contract, with the album “Stand!” Earn overwhelming praise. Compatible performance in Woodstock Leave their brand, Epic Records, keen on the next version. However, by 1971, all that was presented was a few individuals and the greatest album. The stone was absent from the registration of the appointments. His relationship with the division began to fade amid creative disputes, drug use, and wrong Sly behavior. Amid all this, “there is a riot in” landing “as a trend, as if he shook himself from a long sleep, looked at the country, and realized that he could not stand up to endure it in the same way.
“There are riots” almost the opposite of some of the most activated and friendly endeavors for the plans and its professional life earlier. “Stand!” It was registered in Pacific High Studios, in San Francisco. A few days after being released on Thursday, when the police took the anti -war protests in Berkeley, killing one and wounding at least one hundred and twenty eight. After “stand!” Proved a kind of uncompromising optimism, with the words of cheerful decoration that was mysterious and sometimes gauze. It has been closed with a song “You can make it if you try”, which led to confidence that wealth may change for all of us. In time between “standing!” Stone faced “there is a riot”, which faced sixty pressure from black leopards, whose leaders wanted to be more directly directly from the political point of view, and to destroy his band. Ideal died in the 1960s, and with her death, the harsh facts came for the new moment: political assassinations, the expansion of police violence, the changing civil rights movement, and a feeling of disappointment that seemed to be chasing the stone while searching for a purpose that exceeds the star in the field of Habi.
The grooves on “riots” were deeper and darker, as singing collisions were barely similar to the language. There was a kind of performance of indifference in the album, which felt as a reflection of the living Sly reality – a kind of anger that led to confusion, then exhaustion – and simulation of the Habi movement, and interrogation where the people who left behind left. On the first track, “Luv N ‘Haight”, Sly’s voice is a distorted jealousy as he sings the opening words: “I feel good in myself / I don’t want to move.” As the song progresses, it becomes a multi -emotional collision: I feel in good condition I feel in good condition you want to move you want to move Exit against I feel good in myself, don’t want to move. It is difficult to know where one phrase is peeled from the other, or whether the statement is contradicting with each other. It is present in the same devastating mind: we have to do something; We do not know what it is. There was a feeling of resolving both determination and resignation in the album, a sorrow that looks almost in a conversation with the end of the “Stand!” Now, on flagrant and rugged musical instruments, the stone guaranteed that you, like it, may be dreaming.
The lyrics were not necessarily pessimistic, and not all of them were explicitly political, but they were distorted with a kind of irony that seemed to go beyond the country. On the “just like a child” path, Sly complains in a low record on a painful keyboard and a LO-Fi cylinder machine about betrayal, and how he cries because he knows when he is deceived. There is “you” in the heart of the song – “I can feel it when you lie to me” – and that “you” can be, of course, a person. But it could look easily as if the Sly was bothering a city, an entire country or a group of ideals. “RIOT”, among other things, was an album on betrayal. At “Time”, Sly ends with half wounds of “time, as they say, is the answer” before the launch of a small muffled laugh, then a high-tone shout-“but I can’t believe it!”-Follow it as a calm and exhausting sigh.
I do not think that this stone meant its response to the title of the fighting. Both albums were made by men who believed that America they knew was something, and it is a recovered place that temporarily lost its way, just to see that it becomes something else faster than they could understand. Drawing how one of the illusions of a person – shock, sadness or disappointment – can form a political action. Gaye built his concept album about a spokesman that was out of war. As for the stone, the war was always at home, and it was lost; There are no longer fans from people to rise and try to reach some of the finish line outside the horizon. The finish line was a fantasy like the horizon that dreams itself. What I love in “riots” is that there is no veil between the speaker and the soul. It is just a malicious, withdraws his previous ideas through the wreckage of the current facts. It is malicious, discontent, and far, wandering in a “family relationship” (which will be the final successful for the first group), “You cannot leave” because your heart is present / but certainly, you cannot stay “because you were in another place.” I love “riots” too, because it is not an album for solutions. It is an album of huge meditation, but not an invitation to work. No one urges to climb to the streets. Stone does not seem interested in being a speaker. The album title is four seconds. In 1997, when sixty was asked about it, he said he left her silent because he “felt that there should be no riots.”
It will be easy to draw similarities with our current political moment. It will be easy to tell you that I got the American Professional League finals on a TV on the other night, but I hardly saw the first half because I was walking feverish on the Internet, in an attempt to track the resistance A movement that is revealed in Los AngelesAnd another reveals a small boat, full of humanitarian supplies, heading to Gaza. I find it more difficult, and perhaps more useful, to ask an internal question, which gets a deeper accusation regulation that the stone is detailed on “riots”: When will you realize that your country is legend? And if you already have, what you might do after that? ♦
