There's a Riot Goin' On
With brisk wit and wiry analysis, Miles Marshall Lewis examines the recording process and spirit of the times surrounding the landmark Sly & the Family Stone album, There's a Riot Goin' On. Recorded during 1971 in a gothic Los Angeles mansion amid drugs, sex, violence, and the inspiring camaraderie of musicians like Miles Davis, Billy Preston, Ike Turner, Herbie Hancock, and Bobby Womack, There's a Riot Goin' On is at once the height and dark depth of the first black rock group and the haunted genius at its center, Sly Stone.
Miles Marshall Lewis is author of Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don't Have Bruises, a memoir of growing up in the Bronx amidst the emergence of hip-hop culture. Lewis's writing has appeared in The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Blender, Spin, The Believer, and many other publications. He is the founder and editor of Bronx Biannual and lives in Paris, France, with his wife and baby boy.
Chapter Two: The Believer Whose Faith Was Shattered
Picture forty years after the Woodstock Festival's three days of peace and music, into the premillennial days of 1999. Visualize through the eyes of a contemporary counterpart of someone like Meredith Hunter, the black teen murdered by Hells Angels at the Rolling Stones Altamont concert, who'd certainly have thought Sly and the Family Stone at Yasgur's farm in '69 was totally far out. For the sake of argument let's say this modern-day Meredith wears dredlocks in place of his antecedents Afro, smokes as much weed as Meredith might've, and rents a brownstone apartment in the heart of bohemian Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Such a location means he has a neighbor in Erykah Badu, who represents something of particular significance to the young brother. (We'll call him Butch.) Erykah Badu recently arrived from Dallas, Texas, three years ago like a hiphop Joan Baez for the incense-and-oils set, to this section of Brooklyn where most of the women already look like her: African headwraps, ankh jewelry pieces, thrift store fashion. For Butch the runaway success of her 1997 debut Baduizm and its Live album followup means something. In specific he thinks the singers tendency towards preaching her earth mama philosophy to sold-out audiences implies that spiritual knowledge is being spread, that consciousness is being raised to a tipping point, that Erykah Badu fans will spill out of nationwide venues discovering holistic healing and transcendental meditation and Kemetic philosophy and vegan diets for themselves. What would this mean, for the millions who follow Erykah Badu's music to embrace the singers lifestyle on a mass level at this specific period in time, the cusp of the Aquarian age? Butch wonders.
But that's not all. In April Butch saw The Matrix in a crowded Flatbush Pavilion theatre and all spring everyones been talking about how were "living in the Matrix, man," puffing on blunts of marijuana-filled cigars at house parties and discussing the subversive information laced throughout the film. People really get it: the society that weve been led to believe matters only serves the agenda of those who prop it up as the standard. Butch feels that everyone is on the verge of pulling the rubber pipe out the back of his head and redefining the social order. Society is in for an interesting turn; theres no way The Matrix can be this popular and millions of moviegoers not overstand what it's really saying, he feels.
On top of this, every single day Butch sees someone on the A train to Manhattan with some sort of spiritual personal improvement book. If not Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet then Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. If not James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy then Dennis Kimbro's Think and Grow Rich. He reads a few of them himself: Conversations With God, The Alchemist, The Four Agreements, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, Heal Thyself, Tapping the Power Within. Deepak Chopra becomes a more omnipresent talking head on Butch's TV set. Oprah redefines the mission of her talk show and urges her viewers to "be your best self," The Oprah Winfrey Show exposing even exurban housewives to spiritualists like Yoruba minister Iyanla Vanzant on a regular basis. Things are coming together, Butch thinks. The sixties flirted with revolution; the nineties threaten the even greater prospect of evolution.
And as certain things come together, others fall apart--like the recording industry. Butch hasn't bought a CD in quite a while. All the music he wants is available on Napster and he already laid down a few hundred dollars for a portable MP3 player. After decades of nefarious activities--contractually cheating musicians out of profits; overcharging the public for compact discs; paying artists less than fifteen percent of their musics earnings and owning their master recordings forever and ever--record companies felt the big payback, revenge. To Butch record companies seem like the first crumbling institution in a wave of falling multinational corporate entities to follow.
In the Brooklyn arts community surrounding him unsigned independent bands all take encouragement from the digital revolution, burning their own CDs, setting up their own websites, selling their own music. Screw the industry. In the new age everyone can have his own record label, be her own CEO. One's artistic worth won't be measured or rejected by a corporation. On the verge of the twenty-first century Butch saw people self-actualizing, believing in themselves without looking for outside approval. How liberating.
To top things off the death of immediate hiphop icons Tupac Shakur and the Notorious BIG has made the power of intention common knowledge to the pop community. At first only a few made the crass observation that Biggie Smalls named his albums Ready to Die and Life After Death and was then killed; that Tupac rhymed incessantly about death and dying young and was murdered at 25. The moral slowly spilling over into the mass consciousness? We get what we ask for, all of us. This was the beginning, Butch thought, of folks being more careful of what they put out into the universe, consciously exercising universal laws of cause and effect more carefully. It's the biggest legacy the senseless deaths of the young and talented MCs could have left their generation.
Butch was all ready for the 2000s, bring em on. The Y2K computer scare came and went, tail between its legs. The election of George W. Bush didn't bode well. But at the time it seemed at least to bring into question the notion of the Electoral College system, another antiquated structure ripe for rehauling and replacement for the new age.
And then September 11 came.
In 2001 the first foreign attack on US soil ushered in a period of disillusionment as considerable as that of the early seventies, at least for Butch and his peers. The idealism that typified his Brooklyn boho scene gradually dissolved. People moved. They had babies, took nine-to-fives to support families. Beset by the boroughs backbiting Erykah Badu re-relocated back to Dallas with her and Andre 3000's baby boy, Seven. Radio and listeners alike fell in love with Jill Scott's debut; less preachy, less pretentious. Folks got lax with their meditation, started backsliding on their vegetarian diets, dismantling their altars. Cut their dredlocks, some of them. The Matrix sequels came out. They sucked. The government shut down Napster and the record industry appropriated the whole digital download movement: the iPod came out, and it didnt suck. By and large the new age that Butch highly anticipated was a letdown, a non-event. Looking back, his lofty expectations started to appear softheaded as the years passed.
When someone eventually crafts a soundtrack for the disillusionment Butch's generation feels for the thwarted promises of the Aquarian age--any day now, by my watch--it'll without a doubt share a kindred spirit with There's a Riot Goin' On.