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The Star
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
Fashion fabulosity: Sly Stone didn't just change music – he changed style too
In 1974, decades before Ye, then known as Kanye West, packed Madison Square Garden for a twin album-fashion spectacular, Sly Stone, the cosmically groovy singer-songwriter who died Monday (June 9), offered his own extravaganza of dance, funk and flash on New York's biggest stage. The occasion was a sold-out Sly & The Family Stone concert in front of more than 20,000 fans, and the centrepiece was Stone's wedding to Kathy Silva – a gold and black display of fabulosity. The bride and groom (and the whole wedding party, band included) wore coordinated Halston looks. Stone wore a gleaming cape and jumpsuit, the waist cinched with a big gold belt buckle, so he looked like a cross between a disco superhero and a sci-fi lord come lightly down to Earth. Behind them, a dozen models in black dresses carried gold palm fronds. It was, The New Yorker declared, 'the biggest event this year'. It was also seven years after Stone arrived on the music scene promising A Whole New Thing (the name of his debut album), and boy, had he delivered. Read more: A new generation of fashion lovers are just getting to know Steve Madden Sly Stone's style crossed genre, race, gender and audience. It offers unity in a psychedelic stew of fringe, rhinestones and lame that was sometimes celebratory and sometimes chaotic, often outrageous, but almost always impossible to forget. Photo: Instagram/Sly Stone He introduced not just a whole new sound but a whole new kind of style to the stage. Like his music, it crossed genre, race, gender and audience, offering unity in a psychedelic stew of fringe, rhinestones and lame that was sometimes celebratory and sometimes chaotic, often outrageous, but almost always impossible to forget – whether it was on The Ed Sullivan Show or the Woodstock stage. 'He had a look,' Questlove, drummer, record producer, disc jockey, filmmaker, music journalist, and actor, wrote in the introduction to Stone's 2023 autobiography, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) . He loved an accessory: a necklace, an arm band and, especially, a hat. He wore giant, broad-brimmed fedoras long before Pharrell Williams stepped out in his 20-gallon Vivienne Westwood number in 2014, as well as crocheted toppers and exaggerated newsboy caps – like the silver-sequinned style he wore with his magenta-sequinned shirt for a performance on The Midnight Special in 1974. He was his own Spaced Cowboy (the name of his song) in Nudie suits, spangled vests and wigs. 'He challenged people's perception of normalcy,' Williams wrote in The New York Times . 'He wore seriously fly clothes, and to this day, I have no idea how he walked around in those platforms.' And it wasn't just him; it was the whole band. Stone had a theory of fashion just as he had a theory of rhythm, one that emphasised the individual within the group dynamic. He would pick the colours for the crew – his favourites were red, white and black, which were also the colours of his living room, but within that spectrum, they were free to go their own way. At a time when many Motown bands still wore matching suits and ties, the idea that band members should dress to express their own bliss was revolutionary. 'Sly had the idea that we should be in the same theme, but make it be your own personality,' Jerry Martini, the band's saxophone player, said in a video interview posted on the band's YouTube channel in 2013. Read more: 'Doing what I love': Malaysian fashion designer Zang Toi is living his best life He also described a day when Stone, dissatisfied with whatever outfit Martini had planned, looked around, grabbed a razor and cut up a cow-skin rug for him to wear like a poncho. The point, Greg Errico, the band's drummer, said in the video interview, was 'to be colourful'. Not just to stand out, although they definitely did that, but 'to be like (what) music is – music is technicolour'. Stone understood the power that came from connecting the ears and eyes, and he stuck to that conviction through his struggles with drugs and the industry, as his appearance during a 2006 Grammys tribute in silver lame and a giant blond mohawk attested. He didn't just sing about embracing 'the skin I'm in'. He offered everyone a bedazzled primer for how that might look. – ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Atlantic
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Sly Stone's Pop-Funk Radicalism
It's a real American moment out there: battle lines drawn, tear gas drifting, charity and gentleness on their heels. Turn inward, inside ourselves, and it looks even worse, the mind's landscape pocked and blackened with destruction. Can somebody please bring the beautiful music, to carry us up and out? Someone like Sly Stone, who died on Monday at the age of 82. Sly was a born transcender, a natural synthesizer of situations, a raiser of elements to their highest state of possibility. Black, white; R&B, rock; politics, carnival; great taste, screaming excess; heaven and Earth: He put it all together. On a tight curve of musical euphoria, he led his people—which was everybody, or so he claimed—out of conflict. The opposing force was in him too, equally strong as it turned out: drag, downwardness, drugs, isolation. Who in the world would ever have the power to shut him down? Only Sly himself. It's remarkable that he lived as long as he did. But in his glorious and self-consuming prime—'68 to '71, roughly—he harmonized the energies that were tearing and would continue to tear this country to pieces. Dangerous work, highly exposed, but he made it look like a party. And in the floating jubilee that was his band, the Family Stone, he gave America a vision of itself: racially and emotionally integrated, celestially oriented, if not healed then at least open to healing. What to listen to, right now, as you're reading this? You could start with 1969's 'Stand!' A circus crash of cymbal, a burlesque snare roll, and away we go: 'Stand, in the end, you'll still be you / One that's done all the things you set out to do.' The vocals are airy, haughtily enunciated in the high hippie style, and embellished with happy trills; the melody chugs along with a nursery-rhyme simplicity that is somehow underwired by knowingness: innocence and experience conjoined. (The Beatles were very good at this too, but Sly's true peer in this area, oddly, was a later songwriter: Kurt Cobain.) And the lyrics are classic Sly: a pinch of psychedelic double-talk—'You have you to complete and there is no deal'—and an ounce of street knowledge. The song rises and falls, jogging on the spot as it were, but with a building gospel crescendo of a half-chorus—'Stand! Stand! Stand!'—that seems to presage or demand release. And release is granted, unforgettably. It comes out of nowhere, with less than a minute of music left: a sudden loop of chiming, uplifted, militant, and taut-nerved funk, resolving/unresolving, tension and deliverance together, guitars locked; the drummer, Greg Errico, is thrashing out an ecstatic double-time pattern on his hi-hat (and doing it, if you watch the live footage, with one hand). From 'Stand!' you might go to 1970's 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).' Everything in America is one year worse, one year more violent and bummed-out, and although the music stays celebratory (with a finger-popping bass line from Larry Graham that famously invented the next two decades of funk playing), lyrically, Sly is darkening: 'Lookin' at the devil / Grinnin' at his gun / Fingers start shakin' / I begin to run.' He quotes himself, his own (very recent) hits, his own nostrums of positivity, in a charred-by-time kind of way, 'Different strokes for different folks' right next to a new observation, 'Flamin' eyes of people fear burnin' into you.' We're on course here for the Sly-in-ruins of 1971's There's a Riot Goin' On, his woozy sayonara to the years of greatness. Druggy and drum-machined, with a rippling American flag on the cover, Riot is the album that most directly connects him to the present situation. Decades of obscurity followed—which is a cliché, but he lived it, as durably and intensely as he had lived the cliché of superstardom. 'The pure products of America go crazy,' as William Carlos Williams said. And now he's left us, when once again brutality is massing behind its shields, and once again compassion has acquired the nobility of true folly. All very familiar to Sly the avatar. I can't stop thinking about these lines from 'Stand!,' so wistfully prophetic, so half-encouraging, so dead-on predictive of our mass retreat into the space behind our eyes: 'Stand, don't you know that you are free / Well, at least in your mind if you want to be.'
Time Magazine
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Sly Stone Knew Why America Rioted Better Than Anyone
Fifty-five summers ago, a riot broke out in Chicago's Grant Park, where Sly and the Family Stone was booked to play a concert. Sly was on en route, but the crowd, fearing that the erratic rock star wouldn't appear, started throwing bottles and rocks onstage. This, in turn, provoked police to wade into the crowd, beating people with nightsticks. As the incensed crowd spilled out across the park, windows were smashed, and cars were overturned. Three people were shot, although it wasn't clear by whom, and 160 more were injured. The dystopian scene was a far cry from a Sly concert the year before: Woodstock in '69, where the band, operating at the peak of its powers, had implored its 400,000 rapt attendees to take it higher into the wee hours of the morning. But the Summer of Love and the ensuing years had given way to disillusionment and rage, and Sly felt this shift acutely. 'I had sensed a shadow was falling over America,' he wrote in his 2023 memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). 'The possibility of possibility was leaking out and leaving the country drained.' Sly, who died on June 9 at the age of 82, wrung greatness out of this abyss. He channeled the Grant Park riot and larger national anxieties into the 1971 album There's A Riot Goin' On, now considered one of the best albums of all time. A swampy morass of funk grooves and murmured mantras, the album captured a sociopolitical undercurrent that America had long resisted acknowledging: a brew of exhaustion, trauma, resilience, and determined joy bubbling from the country's dispossessed margins. And as America confronts a new era of unrest, there are few albums made today that capture an unyielding spirit that still courses through the country: of dogged individualism and collective civil disobedience. Future Utopias Stone was once the avatar of a more peaceful, unified future. In the mid-'60s, when anti-miscegenation laws were still being upheld in many states, he formed Sly and the Family Stone, one of the country's first mainstream racially integrated bands. 'There were race riots going on at the time,' Greg Errico, the band's white drummer, told Rolling Stone in 2015. 'Putting a musical group together with male and female and Black and white, to us, it felt really natural and cool and comfortable, but it made a statement that was definitely threatening to some people.' The band's diversity wasn't just skin-deep, but also musical, as they fused funk, rock, soul, and psychedelia into up-tempo anthems with pure, motivational messages: Stand. Dance to the music. Everybody is a star. Their vision of America was a place where all sorts of outdated boundaries could be broken down; they embodied the long arc of the universe bending toward justice. But in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, as was Bobby Kennedy. One day, while the band was on tour and riots were unfolding across the nation, the band was accosted by guardsmen while stopping for gas in a Michigan town under curfew. One of the guardsmen called a white woman in their group a '[ N -word] lover,' and tried to provoke them into resisting, Sly writes in his memoir. 'We got out of there without too much trouble, other than all the trouble,' he recounts dryly. As the Vietnam War dragged on and violence inside the country mounted, Sly grew increasingly disillusioned with the nation's trajectory. 'You couldn't take turns with freedom. You couldn't have one moment where freedom went with the majority and one where it went with the money and one where it went with one skin color or another,' he later recounted. His fame was also taking a toll: plagued by expectations, hangers-on, and feeling used by the industry, he soon turned heavily to drugs and drinking. The riot begins Stone channeled all of these discontents into There's a Riot Goin' On. It was a far cry from its predecessor Stand!, which commanded alertness and action. There's a Riot, conversely, was not militaristic, but mutant. It did not press to impress, but forced the listener to adjust to its oozing pace, its fuzziness, its Blackness. Sly's constant overdubbing and reworking of the tape caused it to disintegrate, giving its sound a gritty veil. On the record, he gasped and murmured, holding too long to opaque phrases, his words seemingly spilling out of a collective unconscious of unrest—'made by no one and everyone, made under the influence of substances and of itself,' he later wrote. The album's provocative title was a reference to several touchpoints: the 1954 song 'Riot in Cell Block No. 9' by the Robins, which jubilantly depicts a prison uprising; Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, released earlier in 1971, which lamented war and moral decay; and the Grant Park riot from a year earlier. It also represented, he wrote in his memoir, 'the riot that was going on inside each person.' On its cover was a modified version of the American flag, suggesting that small and big riots alike had always been part of America's legacy—and that the nation's fabric was changing in fundamental ways. The album, which confused some reviewers at the time, is now revered as an American classic. The record's bass and drums influenced later funk icons like Parliament Funkadelic, as well as groundbreaking jazz-funk explorations from Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. Its stripped drum machine sounds created a blueprint for many hip-hop artists. 'Listen close, because there's no way in hell a major label will ever again let out this much horrible truth,' wrote Pitchfork 's Andy Beta while naming it the fourth best album of the '70s. 'Yes, it's the very first funk album,' Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson told NPR this year, while promoting his new documentary Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden Of Black Genius). 'But for me, it's probably 41 of the most painful documented minutes in a creator's life…I hear someone crying for help, but because the music is so awesome and so mind-blowing, you know, we wind up fetishizing his art, and you don't see the pain of it or the fact that Black pain is so beautiful.' After making the album, Stone slipped even further into addiction, depression, and paranoia, sometimes going for years at a time without public appearances. But while he may not have been a role model, he was a 'real model,' he liked to say. And there will never be another album like There's a Riot Goin' On, which is the sound of a genius straining against the edges of convention; of a teeming mass fighting for freedom; of love being found in a hopeless place. In 2023, TIME conducted a written interview with Sly, who was struggling with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) and near deafness. TIME asked him how the summer of 2020 compared with other summers of protest that he had lived through. 'I still watch the news and still think about what could make things better in America,' he wrote. 'There are days when it feels like things are going in the wrong direction, that every good thing has two bad things behind it. Black and white, rich and poor, we have to find some way to live together without hurting each other. It's not simple but it's important.'
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sly Stone, Sly and the Family Stone Frontman, Dead at 82
Sly Stone has died. He was 82 The rocker was known for Sly and the Family Stone hits like "Dance to the Music" and "Everyday People" "While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come," his family said in a statementSly Stone, the leader of the band Sly and the Family Stone, one of the most influential bands in the development of funk, soul, R&B, rock and psychedelic music, has died. He was 82. "It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved dad, Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone," his family said in a statement on Monday, June 9. "After a prolonged battle with COPD and other underlying health issues, Sly passed away peacefully, surrounded by his three children, his closest friend, and his extended family. While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come." The statement continued, "Sly was a monumental figure, a groundbreaking innovator, and a true pioneer who redefined the landscape of pop, funk, and rock music. His iconic songs have left an indelible mark on the world, and his influence remains undeniable. In a testament to his enduring creative spirit, Sly recently completed the screenplay for his life story, a project we are eager to share with the world in due course, which follows a memoir published in 2024." "We extend our deepest gratitude for the outpouring of love and prayers during this difficult time. We wish peace and harmony to all who were touched by Sly's life and his iconic music. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your unwavering support," it concluded. Sly and the Family Stone's membership included two of his actual siblings, and they released massive hits like "Dance to the Music,' "Everyday People" and "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).' However, his drug use and behavior affected the group, which split up for good in the '80s. Sly was born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, in 1943. The family soon moved to California, where Sly began singing in the church choir from the age of 4, alongside his siblings. His nickname Sly came about when a classmate misspelled his name, and once he changed his stage surname from Stewart to Stone, his siblings Freddie and Rose, both of whom joined him in Sly and the Family Stone, did the same. Sly began performing in bands in high school, then went on to study music theory at Solano Community College. By the mid '60s, he had left school to work as a DJ for San Francisco's KSOL, which became known as KSOUL because of its focus on the soul genre. He also worked with many emerging acts. By 1966, Sly had his band, Sly and the Stoners, and Freddie had his, Freddie and the Stone Souls. They decided to join forces. 'The band had a concept — white and Black together, male and female both, and women not just singing but playing instruments,' Stone wrote in his 2023 memoir Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). 'That was a big deal back then, and it was a big deal on purpose.' Sly and the Family Stone began performing together in 1967 and released their debut album, A Whole New Thing, that year. "It was like seeing the Black version of The Beatles,' funk legend George Clinton told CBS in 2023 of Sly and the Family Stone. 'He had the sensibility of the street, the church, and then, like, the qualities of a Motown, you know, Smokey Robinson — he was all of that in one person." 'Dance to the Music,' also released in 1967, was their first hit single. They released their album of the same name the next year. Stand, released in 1969, became their biggest success, with hits like 'Everyday People,' "Hot Fun in the Summertime" and "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)"/"Everybody Is a Star.' They performed at Woodstock that summer. Cynthia Robinson, who played trumpet, recalled to PEOPLE in 1996 about their performance of 'I Want to Take You Higher.' 'It was pouring rain. Freddie got shocked. The equipment was crackling. But Sly was like a preacher. He had half a million people in the palm of his hand.' That same summer, the band also performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival, as documented in Questlove's Oscar-winning documentary Summer of Soul. However, Sly began to struggle amid heavy drug use. During 1970 and 1971, he missed a third of the band's concerts. In 1974, Sly married Kathy Silva during one of the band's performances at Madison Square Garden. They shared son Sylvester Jr., born a few months before the wedding. Silva told PEOPLE in 1996 of their marriage, 'He beat me, held me captive and wanted me to be in ménages à trois. I didn't want that world of drugs and weirdness.' She continued, 'He'd write me a song or promise to change, and I'd try again. We were always fighting, then getting back together.' But in 1976, his dog bit Sylvester Jr., and Silva divorced him. Sly and Cynthia Robinson shared a daughter, Sylvyette Phunne, born in 1976. He welcomed a third child, Novena, in 1982. Sly and the Family Stone released Greatest Hits in 1970 and There's a Riot Goin' On in 1971, considered one of the most influential albums of all time. But tensions were beginning to boil over in the band. Later albums featured more and more of Stone and less of the rest of the band, and in 1975, they broke up. Sly began working on solo music. "Some people actually believed that I could not finish a project," he told PEOPLE in 1980. "I was pissed off at a lot of things. So much got on my nerves.' His solo efforts were not as successful, and drugs continued to derail his career. In 1983, Sly was arrested for cocaine possession in Florida. He went to rehab in 1996, with Sylvester Jr. telling PEOPLE at the time, 'He went in by choice, to concentrate on getting healthier. He's had problems because he hasn't been able to grow up. He's meant no harm to anyone.' In 1993, Sly and the Family Stone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but he kept his distance from the rest of the band, only coming on stage at the end of the induction. Sly mostly remained out of the public eye after that. A rare appearance came at the 2006 Grammy Awards, where a tribute to the band was performed — but he left the stage midway through the performance. He appeared on stage with the band at a handful of performances after that. In 2017, he received the Recording Academy's lifetime achievement award. Sly finally got clean in 2019, after his drug use landed him in the hospital four times in a period of a few weeks. The doctor told him drugs would kill him. 'That time, I not only listened to the doctor but believed him,' he told The Guardian in 2023. 'I realized that I needed to clean up. I concentrated on getting strong so that I could get clean. My kids visited me at the hospital. My grandkids visited me. I left with purpose.' In 2023, he released his memoir Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), named after the band's classic 1970 single. In it, he wrote of other people talking about his life: 'They're trying to set the record straight. But a record's not straight, especially when you're not. It's a circle with a spiral inside it. Every time a story is told, it's a test of memory and motive.… It isn't evil, but it isn't good. It's the name of the game, but a shame just the same.' In 2025, Questlove released the documentary Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius), which chronicled the musician's rise and fall. Despite his ups and downs, he told The Guardian in 2023, 'I never lived a life I didn't want to live.' In the film, which premiered at Sundance and is now streaming on Hulu, Stone's son and daughters were interviewed, with Carmel demonstrated just how normal things had become for the star since his wild rock star days. She said that when she asked Stone what he wanted to eat for his birthday, all he asked for was a "big pizza with all of the toppings." 'He's also a big fan of Westerns and cars,' she says. 'He's kind of just like, a standard old Black man.' During a recent Q&A screening of the film, producer Joseph Patel explained that he and Questlove opted not to feature Stone on camera in a new interview in the documentary because it didn't 'feel right' given his frail health. "Ahmir's first thing he said was, 'Let's tell this story with a lot of empathy.' That's not empathetic,' Patel said. "We interviewed Sly for [the Oscar-winning documentary] Summer of Soul in 2020. And he had just gotten clean, and he just — he doesn't have the motor function. He can't speak in full sentences. His eyes reveal a precociousness and a lucidity that's there, but his motor function doesn't exist." While the documentary doesn't skip over Stone's decades-long struggle with substance abuse, Questlove said the "most important part" was to present Stone as a person rather than a personality, because "it's rare that Black people get seen as humans." Sly is survived by his children. Read the original article on People
Black America Web
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Black America Web
Sly Stone's Music Formed The Backdrop To Several Hip-Hop Classics
Sly Stone, a legendary musician who helped propel funk to its elevated heights in the realm of Black music, has died. Hip-Hop artists of various eras have sampled Sly Stone's work over the years, and we've got a playlist highlighting some of those audio classics. As Hip-Hop Wired reported earlier, Sly Stone, born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, passed away Monday (June 9) at the age of 82. After establishing his roots in the Bay Area as a musical prodigy, Stone ventured into becoming a front-facing artist with his Sly and The Stones in the 1960s with the late Cynthia Robinson, the trumpeter who was a founding member of Sly and the Family Stone, the band that catapulted Stone into the annals of music history. Alongside fun pioneers such asJames Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic, Stone and his band enjoyed a successful run of album releases extending into the late 1970s. Stone's life was captured in the 2023 biography, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), written with Ben Greenman, featuring a foreword from Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson. Thompson also produced the stirring 2025 documentary centered on Stone's life and legacy, Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) . Hip-Hop artists such as LL Cool J, Queen Latifah, The Jungle Brothers, Public Enemy, and scores more dug into the crates to grab bits of Stone's music to form the backdrop of their works. Below, we've got a handful of those songs featured in the playlist below. Long live Sly Stone. May he rest powerfully in peace. — Photo: Michael Putland / Getty Sly Stone's Music Formed The Backdrop To Several Hip-Hop Classics was originally published on Samples 'Trip To Your Heart.' Samples 'Dance to the Music.' Samples 'You Can Make It If You Try.' Samples 'Sing A Simple Song.' Samples 'Everyday People.' Black America Web Featured Video CLOSE
