Every time you turn on the radio, you are hearing Sly Stone.
That’s not literal. It’s not just a poetic exaggeration, either. Whether your bag is rock or rap or soul or pop, the artists you love either loved Sly And The Family Stone or loved artists who loved Sly And The Family Stone.
That’s because Sly Stone created music without boundaries or regard for the constraints of genre. It was Black music, because Sly was Black, and that’s the only kind of music we can make. But the sound was universally appealing, defying the racist radio standards that persist to this day.
As pointed out in endless histories of rock and roll, hip-hop, pop, and country (including Questlove’s Sly Stone documentary Sly Lives! [aka The Burden of Black Genius]), when Stone started making music in the 1960s as a DJ in San Francisco, commercial music broadly belonged to just two categories: pop and “race” records, meaning Black-originated genres.
The primary distinction between those categories wasn’t a time signature or unique preference for instrumentation, lyricism, or vocal intonation. It was the skin color of the performer. Lots of stories have documented and dramatized this distinction, but my favorite among them is the “Cadillac Car” sequence from the 2006 Dreamgirls adaptation. Here, check it out:
But Sly Stone lived up to his moniker in his approach to circumventing this system. By assembling his band of both Black and white members, incorporating both men and women, he bypassed record executives’ and radio programmers’ instinctive need to classify the band’s music by their facial characteristics or gender presentation.
When their manager, David Kapralik, advised Sly that the music needed to be more broadly accessible after the band’s debut album A Whole New Thing flopped commercially, Sly knew how to simplify the songwriting to appeal to anyone’s sensibilities. Sly Lives has a remarkable breakdown of just why “Dance To The Music,” the group’s breakout hit, was able to tap into every taste, no matter the market.
As Jerry Martini, the group’s saxophonist, points out, the song’s drum line is “close to the Motown beat… but it ain’t.” There are elements of jazz, with the scatting of the background singers offering familiarity to fans of that music, along with horns backing the howling of the electric rock guitar.
Each piece is spotlighted in the breakdown, giving everyone something to look forward to. In many ways, “Dance To The Music” is the Platonic ideal of the concept of the American Melting Pot — many voices coming together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. It fits that the song skyrocketed The Family to Top 10 status and set about laying the groundwork of the group’s ubiquity in modern sound.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a genre that was influenced by Sly And The Family Stone. Some of their first shows after blowing up in 1968 were with guitar gods like Jimi Hendrix and the performers at Woodstock, filtering out and down to more funky rockers like Beck, Maroon 5, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Funk mainstays like Parliament owe at least some of their popularity to the Family Stone (or all of it, if you ask George Clinton). Like Sly, Prince sought to populate his bands with female members and push against easy categorization.
In the ’80s and ’90s, Sly And The Family became a huge part of the foundation of hip-hop and New Jack swing, with samples of their music appearing in songs from the likes of Arrested Development, 2Pac, Ice Cube, Janet Jackson, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Snoop Dogg, The Roots, and too many others to name. It’d be criminal not to mention, Outkast, which took so many pieces of Sly Stone’s look and philosophy, including breaking with convention and incorporating psychedelia to the street-heard sound saturating 1990s rap radio.
Heck, without Sly, we might not even have Drake. For as maligned as the Canadian pop rapper has been over the past year, he undoubtedly dominated pop culture for the past decade and a half, spreading his own influence throughout music. And Drake himself will tell you, some of his first experiences with maneuvering around the recording industry were visits with his uncle, Larry Graham, one of the founding members of The Family Stone.
Perhaps there’s no better voice to speak about the impact of Sly Stone than Sly himself. At the end of his 2024 autobiography, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), the 81-year-old Sly muses about how peers from his era were so imitable, quoting his brother Freddie. “He was talking about how the world has lost certain kinds of figures that it needs to see itself clearly,” Sly recalls.
“He said there’s no one like Bob Dylan anymore. When I heard, I nodded. He said there’s no one like John Lennon anymore. I nodded again. He said there’s no one like Sly Stone anymore. I couldn’t nod so I just shook my head.” Sly Stone was one of a kind. It seems unlikely that anyone will ever shift global culture in the ways he did. But thanks to his work and his influence, Black artists can create as freely as they want. Everyone can be at least a little like Sly Stone.